#age24

24歳はどんな年にしたいか、目標なんてこれといってないけど、素敵なお財布を頂いたからそれが似合う女性になりたいなあって思ったり。綺麗になりたかったり、いとちゃんや了吾くんにたくさんの愛をあげたかったり、日常の当たり前のことがずっと続きますように。家族みんなが幸せでありますように。その為に、みんなの健康を考えた食事が作れますように！

Week One was fun! I only practiced one day but it was a long session. In total I spent about 3 hours with the violin. The first hour was spent tuning the violin, breaking the E string and having to restring it (Thankfully I had a spare).The second 2 hours were spent learning amazing grace.

First thoughts on tuning:

I expected tuning to be the same as guitar but it’s definitely more difficult. The violin feels a lot more fragile and and after breaking a string once I now live in constant fear while tuning that I’ll break another. While tuning you sort of have to push the peg in as you twist and twisting the peg just a millimeter can change the pitch considerably. Its an exercise in precision and nerve. Sort of like defusing a bomb! My ear has never been good enough to tune a guitar so I’m using the same android app to tune the violin. You pluck a string and the needle tells you if it’s sharp or flat. Maybe someday I won’t need it but for now it’s very handy and does the job.

First thoughts on playing:

I haven’t a breeze what I’m doing, where do I put my fingers and ouch this hurts!

Compared with a guitar the violin is more awkward to hold. You can see what you’re doing easier than with the guitar but only because you’re using muscles you never knew existed in your back, shoulder, wrist and neck to hold the violin up.

I thought I would miss having frets but I don’t. I actually really like that you can’t get fret buzz and don’t have to press the strings so hard. Usually with the guitar, playing for any prolonged amound of time results in blisters on the tips of my fingers but I can’t see that happening with the violin.

To learn how to hold the violin and the bow I watched Alison Sparrow’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88G0O5unNuQ&list=PLDAB59957FE89A899

While playing sometimes I find that I don’t realise I’ve played a wrong note until I’ve played the next open string. Because one finger is placed relative to another the sound doesn’t seem off to my ear until I play an open string and then because it’s perfectly in tune it reveals that the previous notes were out of tune. In saying that I’m finding fingering to be the easiest thing to far.