Violin Home Study Course Lessons Method on CD
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Violin Home Study Course Lessons Method on CDUS School of Music, with MP3 Recordings
A single CD data disk contains: · Violin: Complete 1963 edition of the US School of Music (USSM) 96 Lesson Violin Course · MP3 Recordings: Piano Accompaniment for 24 lessons of violin course · Harmony: 1951 edition of the USSM 48 Lesson Harmony Course · Isometric Finger Control: Exercise program for musicians. The material on my CD is not a quick course with false promises of instant results. It is a full, extensive program, and I try my best to describe it as accurately as I can. As a consequence my description is long. See for Yourself In the description below I provide links that allow you to read online, or download to your own computer, two representative lessons, completely free. I also provide links to some MP3 recordings of violin with piano accompaniment that are representative of the music taught in this course. Due to large file sizes, high speed Internet service is recommended. I provide access to Lesson 1 in order to demonstrate the appropriateness of these lessons for absolute beginners. I also provide access to Lesson 88 in order to demonstrate the impressive level of proficiency that you can achieve using these violin lessons. All lesson files on my CD were produced by scanning original documents and then saving in Adobe Acrobat Reader (PDF) version 7 format. Rather than provide you with one gigantic PDF file, as some sellers do with their digitized sheet music and educational material, I save each lesson in its own file. This makes it much easier for you to access each particular lesson, as well as to print it’s corresponding music assignment. The files are readable on either a MAC or Windows machine using Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which comes already installed on most new computers. In the event that your system does not have it, you can obtain it free online at Adobe's website by activating the following link: http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/ Description of USSM Violin Course In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the US School of Music (USSM) was a well-known and respected school providing excellent home study music courses for a variety of instruments. They advertised extensively in all of the popular music magazines at that time. Their main theme was that their lessons were a complete music education emphasizing, right from the start, interesting pieces of music rather than boring, tedious scales and exercises. Following their method, the study of music was more pleasurable, and as a result the average student was more likely to remain interested and succeed. Playing interesting music as soon as possible helps students develop a love for their instrument, a love that acts as a natural motivator for mastering it. At the same time, don't conclude that the USSM is saying that scales and exercises are of no value. Of course they are valuable and they should be a part of everyone's music training. It’s just that they are not appropriate in the very beginning because they can be tedious, difficult and discouraging. Eventually, after you have mastered a reasonable repertoire that you can be proud of, when the time is appropriate, the USSM course does start to introduce scales, as any legitimate violin course must do. But by the time they do, you will have developed sufficient skills that they will not overwhelm you. Indeed, you may even welcome them. USSM instrument courses typically consist of at least two years of study. They are organized as 96 lessons, each one expected to take the average student a week to master. The original lessons were organized into 8 booklets (called folios), each one containing 12 lessons. Myself, except for the very early, easier lessons, I find that I usually need two weeks to master most of them. Some particularly challenging lessons require even more. So for me this course represents almost four years of study. The level taught starts at the very beginning for students who have never played a note, and progresses to an expert level that would impress anyone. Most standard method books, like “The ABCs of Violin” by Janice Tucker Rhoda, “How to Play Fiddle” by Larry McCabe, and different Hal Leonard publications like “Essential Elements for Strings 2000” and “Play Violin Today” contain only a rudimentary text instruction. Just flip through the pages of any of them and you’ll see mostly music exercises, with little text explanation. The fact is, these books are really intended to be used under the guidance of a classroom or private teacher. The teacher is expected to deliver detailed explanations of various concepts as the student progresses. The books provide little more than a set of progressive exercises and repertoire. Learning at home using such method books, on my own without a teacher, is very difficult for an average person like myself. The US School of Music violin course is much different. It contains in depth explanatory text throughout all levels, from beginner right up to advanced. Flip through the various lessons of any USSM course and you will see a much higher ratio of explanatory text than what you see in standard method books. And with a full 96 lessons totaling more than 300 pages, there is simply no comparison between a USSM course and any standard method book. Indeed, the US School of Music is in a completely different league. These lessons are designed to be used by any person working on their own, at home, without a formal teacher. See attached photos for a small sampling of the text instruction at various levels in this course. The repertoire of this violin course consists of some of history’s most famous pieces, such as “Traumerei” by Schumann, “Elegie” by Massenet, “Song of India” by Rimsky Korsakov, “Humoreske” by Dvorak, as well as pieces by Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Bizet, Verdi, Hoffmann, Rubinstein, Brahms, Handel, and many more. There is also a range of popular titles like “Listen to the Mocking Bird” by Alice Hawthorne, “The Blue Bells of Scotland” by Mrs Jordan, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” by Thomas Moore, “The Old Oaken Bucket” by Kiallmark, “Love’s Old Sweet Song” by Molloy, “Dixie Land” by Dan Emmett, and many more. There is a range of styles from the patriotic, like “La Marseillaise”, which is the national anthem of France, and the Irish song “The Wearing of the Green”, to the seasonal, like “Auld Lang Syne” by Robert Burns. Of course the lessons get you started on simpler pieces. But even in the beginning the assigned pieces of each lesson are sufficiently interesting that they will give you a feeling of accomplishment. They are not childish pieces, like what you find in so many standard method books. These lessons contain real pieces that you will be proud to play in front of family and friends. See attached photos for a small sampling of the repertoire at various levels in this course. To give you an idea of the kind of music you could be soon be playing by studying this violin course, click on the following links. They allow you to listen to recordings of a few assigned pieces from the beginning portions of the course. In these recordings the violin is being played with piano accompaniment. The recordings were produced by a synthesizer. Hence, the violin sound does not have the authentic quality of a real violin. My purpose here is not to give you a formal concert. Such perfect performances are still beyond my capabilities. My purpose is simply to give you an idea of the musical content of the course. Listen Online or Download Music of Lesson 7 http://www.box.net/shared/4d6vzxza0f Listen Online or Download Music of Lesson 19 http://www.box.net/shared/b6mjja48o2 Listen Online or Download Music of Lesson 20 http://www.box.net/shared/xpiv3hp87h The first link is, of course, the famous “My Old Kentucky Home” by Stephen Collins Foster. Imagine being able to play this wonderful piece yourself after only 7 weeks of training. You can also see the sheet music of this piece in one of the photo images of this listing. The music of Lesson 19, Angels’ Serenade by G Braga, is a very famous piece that is traditionally assigned to violin students in formal courses at music schools and conservatories. You get to play it after only 5 months of training (assuming you follow the progress rate suggested in the lessons). I told you these lessons were good. You will notice that the text of these violin lessons uses language (vocabulary and metaphors) that is somewhat dated. After all, this material was written over 40 years ago. I agree that the style of the English language has changed since then, and the motivational parts of these lessons do sound somewhat out-of-date by today's standards. However, it is the underlying message and instruction that is important. I would much rather read text that has real content regardless of how out-of-date it sounds rather than the modern, three-second sound bytes that are so typical of today's highly graphical method books - books that promise instant results but in the end don’t teach you very much. See for yourself. Activate the following links to view online or download two representative lessons. I provide Lesson 1 to prove that you do not need any prior music experience to start these lessons. Confirm for yourself that the lessons start at the very beginning, at a level that you can understand. Read Online or Download Violin Lesson 1 http://www.box.net/shared/bn50udnokg I also provide a link to a representative advanced lesson to demonstrate the very impressive skill level that you can achieve by studying this course. Read Online or Download Violin Lesson 88 http://www.box.net/shared/j7wby0kg0s Although my primary instrument happens to be the piano, this course has inspired me to purchase a violin and to start learning how to play it. I am finding the experience very enlightening and rewarding. Indeed, it is helping me develop a better ear for musical sound. And, by seeing what I have already learned on the piano applied to such a different instrument as the violin, I am developing a broader, deeper understanding of music theory. From what I have studied and accomplished so far, it is clear to me that anyone who seriously works with this course can reach a very impressive skill level on the violin, entirely on their own, at home, without any formal teacher. If you prefer to have a physical paper copy of the US School of Music Violin Course rather than my digitized (scanned) version on CD, I do recommend that you purchase it. However, I should warn you that it does not appear on eBay very often. I should also warn you to be careful. Many of the sellers do not understand such material and don't realize when the lessons are not complete. If ever you see the course described as having less than 96 lessons or less than 8 folios (booklets or folders), you can be sure that it is not complete. Some sellers describe the condition of the lessons as "like new", but when you receive them you discover that the original owner has marked up the written exercises, test sheets, and sometimes even the text and sheet music. It's actually difficult to find this violin course with the early lessons in good condition and not marked up by the original owner. I had to purchase it twice in order to obtain the complete course in good enough condition to use. And finally, some sellers confuse a variety of promotional material that was published by the USSM for the lessons themselves. I am sometimes amazed to see advertisement brochures for the USSM described on eBay as lessons. My CD is not just an advertisement. It contains the actual lessons themselves. In contrast to other sellers I do not sell a wide variety of items. Also, I am not a person who has just discovered this violin material in a friend's attic or at some estate sale, and knows nothing about it. I am an amateur music student, possibly just like yourself. I am actually using this violin course myself to learn how to play violin. I can vouch not only for the completeness of what I send you, but even more importantly I can vouch for the effectiveness of it. The way I see it, any course that can successfully teach violin to an ordinary person like me, who possesses no special musical talent, has got to be good. There is another warning I should give you about physical paper copies of these violin lessons. With material of this age the pages have sometimes deteriorated, becoming stiff or brittle. As a consequence they are often fragile and do not stand up well to constant use. My solution was to digitize (scan) the pages and then save the images on my computer. Thus, I could either view the lessons on the computer screen, or print them out as many times as I liked. Soon I was sharing the material with friends who had similar musical aspirations as myself. Everyone preferred my files to the original paper version because they could mark up their music printouts to show fingering or note letter names as much as they liked, and not have to worry about ruining the originals. They could always get a clean copy from the computer. They could also complete the written exercises in the early lessons as many times as they wished. You may be concerned that after buying my CD you will incur the cost of printing out the lessons. Of course you can print out each entire lesson if you want, but you don't have to. Indeed, I try to discourage printing out all those pages. You can read the text of each lesson from your computer screen and print only the sheet music of each lesson to use at your music stand. Thus, you will save a lot of paper and ink or toner. You can print the sheet music using either a color or a black-and-white printer. It is least expensive to print the pages using a black-and-white laser printer. I have formatted each document to have margins of 0.6 inches in order that they print on all printers in fast, document mode (conserving ink or toner) without the printer software generating any margin warnings and without any of the scanned images being cut off. The sheet music of the assigned pieces in this violin course is written with piano accompaniment. But of course few people have the services of a private pianist to accompany them as they practice their violin at home. Well, in today’s world there is an easy solution. With a computer and music notation software like Finale (often called a music editor), it is a simple matter to enter any sheet music and have the computer play it back for you. You can even easily adjust the tempo (speed) of the playback. However, if you are completely new to music, as I was when I first started studying piano using the USSM Piano Course, you might not have sufficient understanding of music to know how to do that. So, I have done some of that work for you. On the CD you will find recordings in MP3 format of the piano accompaniment for the first 24 lessons of the violin course. These recordings were not created by the US School of Music. I created them myself using my computer, music editing software called Finale (I use a low cost version called PrintMusic), and a Yamaha YPG-625 keyboard/synthesizer. I provide four recordings for each assigned piece, two recordings at half tempo and two recordings at full tempo. At each tempo I provide one recording with both the violin solo and piano accompaniment played together, and a second recording with just the piano accompaniment alone. You can use the recordings that contain both violin solo and piano accompaniment to hear what the final performance should sound like. But even more importantly, you can use it as guidance while you try to learn the piece yourself. As anyone who has studied the violin can tell you, one of the initial challenges is to play notes at the correct pitch. It’s not like the piano that guarantees each note to have perfect pitch (assuming the piano has been professionally tuned). And, it’s not like the guitar, which has frets that define the correct pitch of each note. On the violin there are no frets. You must develop the skill of finding the correct pitch of each note yourself by making slight adjustments to the position of your fingers on the fingerboard. Many beginning violin students, myself included, use finger tape to help train themselves to develop that skill. In addition, playing along with another violin, as you can do with my recordings, greatly facilitates the development of that skill. Indeed, many recently published method books provide accompaniment recordings on a CD or DVD for that exact purpose. Once you have properly mastered each piece you can use the recordings of piano accompaniment alone to embellish your own solo violin playing. To demonstrate this, the following link allows you to listen to the piano accompaniment of the music from Lesson 7 (The Stephen Foster song that your heard earlier). This time you hear only the piano, no violin. Using this recording you are expected to play the violin part yourself. Listen Online or Download Piano Accompaniment Only http://www.box.net/shared/o3q6hggn6q You will notice at the beginning of the recording that I have provided two measures of percussion beats. You will use these beats to synchronize your playing with the accompaniment. You can play all the recordings that I provide on your computer, MP3 player, or CD player. Most MP3 and CD players can be easily instructed to automatically repeat a particular song or track. Thus you can practice the piece many times with piano accompaniment and not have to manually restart the recording every time. Personally I like to burn the files to an audio (music) CD and play them on the CD player of my Hi-Fi amplifier/speaker system. My CD player has a convenient setting for automatically repeating any particular track. I have also had success listening to the recordings on headphones or earplugs while I play violin. You can even use the MP3 files that I provide to make your own recordings of yourself playing violin with accompaniment. This will be easy for you to do if you are familiar with music creation software, like “Pro Tools”. Just add my recordings as a separate audio track and mix it in with your own violin playing, which you can record using a microphone or electronic pickup. The use of violin solo and piano accompaniment recordings is very beneficial to beginning students as a training aid. However, once you have mastered the first dozen or so lessons of the US School of Music Violin Course, you will possess sufficient knowledge and skill that you will no longer need to rely on such aids. Indeed, you will almost certainly want to practice more often without computer generated accompaniment in order that you can better hear and develop the expressive quality of your own playing. Also, as you advance in the course you will most certainly want to play the various assigned pieces a bit differently than the way my recordings are leading you to play them. In other words, you will want to interpret the music in your own way. The bottom line is, computer generated recordings are really only intended as an aid for beginners to achieve a certain proficiency, not as a performance embellishment for intermediate or advanced students. Indeed, a very practical problem can arise when using prerecorded accompaniments for more advanced pieces. Suppose in a particular piece, like that of Lesson 19 for example, there are periods of time, perhaps a measure or two, when the accompaniment is silent. In the real world a human piano accompanist would not only pay attention to your solo, violin performance, but he/she would have visual contact with you. As a result, he/she would know exactly when, by your playing or by your visual queue, to resume playing at the correct beat. If your playing deviates slightly from the exact tempo, the pianist compensates by following your queue. But of course, prerecorded accompaniment does not monitor your playing and follow your queue like a human can. The recording will resume its playing automatically at the theoretically correct beat regardless of whether or not your playing has deviated ever so slightly from the exact tempo. In such a case you may find it close to impossible to remain synchronized to prerecorded accompaniment. In the case of Lesson 19, you may find it more practical to use the recording that has both violin solo and piano accompaniment playing simultaneously. That way you can more easily keep pace with the recording. Still, it is sometimes nice once in a while to play with piano accompaniment, especially for demonstration purposes, which is why I provide accompaniment recordings for a full 24 lessons. By the time you exhaust those, you will have sufficient knowledge of music that you can construct your own recordings yourself, using your own computer. Indeed, at that point you will be able to make recordings that deliver the accompaniment in the exact style and interpretation that you want. Congratulations. You are on your way to becoming a true artist on the violin. As an extra word of advice, although I am not a believer in playing boring scales and exercises when I first start to learn a new instrument, I am a firm believer in learning as many supplementary practice pieces as possible. No single method book or set of lessons (the USSM violin course included) can possibly contain all the repertoire that you need to build real, solid skill at each level in your training. You should never view the repertoire of these violin lessons as the only material that you should be practicing. Rather, you should view it simply as indicative of the kind of material you should be practicing. Remember, although the repertoire of these lessons is good, the power of the course is not its particular repertoire, but rather its text instruction. After you have mastered just five lessons of the USSM violin course, which is only about five weeks into your training, you will have sufficient skill to play a wide range of beginner oriented music. You can look for such material on the Internet. Here are some representative websites. Many such sites offer free material for the beginner. http://www.8notes.com/violin/ http://musiced.about.com/od/freestuff/a/freeviolinsheet.htm Since my own violin playing skills have and continue to profit so much from these lessons, I feel the urge to help others by sharing my digitized files. I don't do this for the money. Indeed, the small minimum bid barely covers my costs. And, it certainly does not compensate me for the many hours I have spent at my computer digitizing (scanning) hundreds of pages of material. No, I am doing this because I love music, love violin, and I love helping others. I want to give others the opportunity to profit as I am profiting from these wonderful violin lessons. With that said, remember that although these lessons are very well written, they cannot automatically impart playing skill by just sitting on your music stand. No music course can do that. No matter how good the lessons, in the end it is your commitment as a student to regular study and practice that will lead to success. Don't believe for one minute those who claim that with certain method books you can realize instant results with minimal effort. Unless you're a natural genius like Mozart, there's no magic bullet. No matter how you disguise it, mastering a musical instrument is a difficult challenge. However, it is also a challenge that given good instruction can be overcome by any motivated person with a strong desire to learn and play. The US School of Music violin course has definitely proved that to me. USSM Modern Harmony Course Every performance musician can profit from a background in music theory and harmony in order to interpret, embellish, improvise, and even compose music on whatever instrument he/she plays. A deeper understanding of this subject allows you to play more artistically. This 48-lesson course is an excellent, hands on, easy introduction to intervals, chord construction, inversions, voice parts, harmonizing melodies, and so forth. To start this course you should know how to read music and how to play well enough to try the course examples as well as to play your own compositions. USSM Isometric Finger Control This is an exercise program intended especially for musicians to improve physical agility and strength, which affect performance. My CD is not a piece of software. It is a library of hundreds of files organized into various folders (directories) according to their purpose. To use my CD you access files directly in Adobe Acrobat Reader or MP3 format. I recommend that you create a new folder on your own hard drive and copy into it all folders and files from my CD. This will allow you to enjoy faster, more reliable, and more convenient access to my files. I include detailed documentation that fully explains all these procedures. | ||||||||||||
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