2. Practice the melody with a relaxed bow

Across the Stars has a smooth, legato articulation. Focus on connecting your notes, whether they’re happening in a slur or separately.

Keep your bow changes slow to keep your tone even. If we accidentally add a burst of speed while changing bow directions, we’ll hear an accent in the sound. Keep your arm moving at a steady pace to shape your phrases intentionally.

3. Pay attention to the key changes

Although Across the Stars begins in E Minor, we quickly change to D Minor and later, G Minor.

E Minor has one sharp, F sharp, in the key signature. D Minor has one flat, B flat, in the key signature; and G Minor has two flats, B flat and E flat.

4. Practice the transition from 4/4 to 3/4

We begin the piece in 4/4 time: 4 quarter note beats per measure; then after just two bars of playing, we switch to 3/4: 3 quarter note beats measure.

Practice counting out loud and feeling the first beat of each measure to make the transition between meter changes easy. Try playing just the two measures of 4/4 and first two measures of 3/4 to really isolate the change and make improvements.

Intermediate Practice Tips

Here are a few pointers to get you started if you’re learning the intermediate arrangement:

1. Warm Up in A Minor

Before practicing Across the Stars, warm up in the key signature, A Minor. This will give you a great foundation to build off of.

When you warm up with a scale, you can go as slow or fast as you’d like: playing a scale slowly allows you to practice perfecting your intonation and creating a beautiful tone, while practicing at a fast pace will help train your fingers to move quickly and accurately.

Download the free A Minor scale sheet music here:

2. Learn the shifts before playing at performance tempo

This arrangement uses 1st position, 2nd position, 3rd position, and 5th position.

Practice the shifts separately, before putting everything together. To do this:

• play the note before the shift
• slide slowly into the new position – listen for when you slide into the new position; we don’t want to go past our destination!
• check that the landing note is in tune

When you can play the shifts smoothly and in tune, work on bringing them up to performance tempo, and then put smaller sections of music together into one cohesive song.

3. Practice dotted eighth note rhythms

Throughout the piece, we play strings of dotted eighth notes.

9/8 and 12/8 are compound time signatures. This means that one eighth note receives one beat. Therefore, a dotted eighth note equals a beat and a half.

That sounds pretty complicated, doesn’t it?

To make it a bit easier, think about 9/8 in three larger dotted quarter note “beats” instead of nine eighth note beats.

Take a look at regular eighth notes in 9/8 versus dotted eighth notes in 9/8:

See how the eighth notes are beamed in groups of three, and there are three groups? This shows us those three bigger dotted quarter note beats.

We could count the measure 1-2-3 4-5-6 7-8-9 or 1-and-a 2-and-a 3-and-a. Either way of counting is completely correct!

The dotted eighth notes are beamed in groups of two, but there are still three groups in the measure. So, each dotted eighth note takes up half of a dotted quarter note beat, equalling 1 and a half eighth notes each.

If this isn’t making sense yet, here’s a different way of looking at it. This is how we’d write out the same rhythm in 3/4 time:

See how the first measure has three notes per beat and the second measure has two notes per beat? That’s the same way we’ll think about the music in 9/8.

I hope you enjoy learning Across the Stars! Want to learn more movie themes? Check out A Romantic Flight from How to Train Your Dragon or A Town with an Ocean View from Kiki’s Delivery Service.