A question for you today. As jazz violinists, when you practice, do you mainly work on “how” you execute your notes or “what” notes you play?

Jazz is often a self guided journey. We are developing our own voice and we need to look at the music in our own time so we can process things properly. You don’t need to be told you are doing thing “right” or “wrong” with your technique so much. You need to space to work out what YOU like and want to focus on. It’s why I have the PREMIUM tier on here. 1x practise club a month 3 x extensive video courses (foundations, learn your first tunes, understand chromatics) 1x etude every month 1x new exercise transcribed each week A selection of past practise club session recordings Right now it’s $19 a month. try it below. https://www.skool.com/jazzviolin/plans

1. INTRODUCE YOURSELF Copy this format and comment below: • your name • where you’re from • your musical background • what you’re trying to achieve in your playing 2. MAKE YOUR FIRST POST This could be: • a jazz violin video you like • a question about learning jazz • or something you’ve found helpful to practice 3. START LEARNING Head to the classroom. There are a number of free courses in there for you to start learning. Whatever your level, I can guarantee there will be something new in there for you. Improv, Bowing, Learning Tunes, Chromatics, a listening list (for members who have posted enough to get to level 2) If you really want to progress, you can get hold of the larger paid courses in there too “Jazz Violin Fundamentals”, “10 Tunes You Must Know”, “46 Lines”, “Mastering Chromatics” BONUS There’s a poll below this post. Let me know what you’re most interested in improving in your playing, it helps me shape the material in here

Thinking this morning about the difference between what we practise for classical music vs jazz… Firstly, what makes a good classical performance? It’s my understanding that in classical music you are firstly trained to master your instrument, look at all possibilities as to HOW you might execute a note and train yourself to easily draw on these techniques when you are interpreting the score. All with the goal to play music with a much natural expression as possible whilst sticking within the parameters of style, compositional intention and taste. All the while, making sure that you are completely in tune with yourself and whatever other musicians you are playing with. Jazz isn’t that different, but on top of the HOW, we also need to focus on WHAT we are going to play. We still need to make sure we sound just as proficient on the instrument and can use our violin to express the same amount of emotion but we also need to be the composer too. And like classical music, most of this work has to be done in the practise room. In classical, you can’t execute a perfect spicatto bowing passage by just winging it on the day and the same goes for improvising over fast moving chord changes that flirt in and out of different key centres. What you need to do in the practise room. Learn Harmony Play Scales Creatively Learn nuggets of jazz language Understand swing rhythm Master all arpeggios and the patterns within them Listen to the music deeply to understand the style PLUS find time to try and incorporate the same practise that classical musicians do for their technique. Sounds hard. But as you carry on down the jazz road you will realise that there are things we can do to try and cover different aspects all at the same time. It’s why I do what I do with scale exercises, follow me on here and you will notice something. Every exercise I post on here and on social media has a number of different purposes. It’s how i deal with that monster list you just read. If you want to go deeper into my way of learning and developing as a jazz musician book in a quick free call with me to chat about your goals.

Challenge! Record your version of this, depending on what’s doable for you, either… In the original key (C Major over a G7) In a few other keys Inside an improvisation over a standard Or as we did last night in practise club, see below… We worked on this one in practise club last night. We took the pattern that this line is based on and played it all the way through all the chords in the C major scale, helping us understand why the melody works and how we can use it. What does this do? Helps us navigate the major scale with patterns and enclosures Drills the sound into our ears and fingers Serves as a technical exercise for our left hand If you are interested in trying out the jazz violin practise club for freejust send me a message or comment on this post.