JULIA'S VIOLIN BLOG

Quite a few of my readers have become interested in making home recordings, and have asked me how to mic a violin. This is a great question! Making high-quality recordings is a great way to keep track of your progress, and to share music with others. Today I’ll go over three different types of microphones [...]

Check out my best tips and insights about adult violin lessons! Learning the violin as an adult can be a lot of fun! There are so many benefits to learning the violin at any age, but as an adult violin student, you have full control over what your journey looks like. I love working with [...]

Learn 18 Tchaikovsky facts that’ll help you understand his music and life! Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the most famous Romantic era composers and one of the first popular Russian composers. In this article, I’ll share 18 facts about Tchaikovsky, from his work as a young composer to the mystery of his death. While [...]

Learn how to memorize music faster with this easy routine. Do you struggle to memorize sheet music? Do you get overwhelmed with the number of notes, fingerings, and bowings to remember? It's time to change that! Here is an easy routine I use to memorize music after struggling with the same issue myself. When I [...]

Johann Sebastian Bach – 28 facts from the life and career of the most famous Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach is widely regarded as one of the top three most well-known music composers in the world, and probably the most important Baroque composer. His music is still troubling aspiring musicians as well as professionals and [...]

A helpful guide that teaches you how to clean violin strings. Have you noticed thick, white dust on your violin strings? Have your strings sounded better? Cleaning strings is an important part of regular violin maintenance, and today I’ll teach you all about it! Why do we want to clean our strings? Clean strings resonate [...]

A list of violin concertos for all levels of violin players If you enjoy classical music, I bet you’ve always wanted to learn a violin concerto. I don’t blame you—that’s one of the reasons I wanted to play the violin, too! Violin concertos are usually written for a soloist to show off and impress the [...]

The Kodály method (oftern spelled as Kodaly, without the special character) is a form of musical education developed by Hungarian composer and pedagogue Zoltán Kodály in the 20th century. Although this is a method music educators use mostly with young children, this different approach to learning music can be very beneficial for adult learners! The [...]

E minor scale on the violin is easy to learn and a great place to start if you want to play pieces in a minor key. You may encounter three versions of any minor scale: the natural, harmonic, and melodic. But today, I am focusing on the E natural minor scale. E Minor Scales, Arpeggios [...]

I'm so excited to share my list of the best violin concertos with you! A violin concerto is an extremely difficult work for a solo violin with an orchestra. These are some of the trickiest, most beautiful pieces of music in the world, and are what many of us hope to aspire to. What goes [...]

A comprehensive guide to Italian music words, terms, and indications. As you begin learning the violin, you might wonder, "why there are so many Italian words in my music?" And, the longer you learn and play written classical music, the more Italian music terms you'll see! It's important to know what they all mean so [...]

One of the most foundational ideas you should learn as a beginning musician is how to read the time signature in music. The time signature, or meter, tells us the number of beats per measure and organizes the sound on the page of sheet music. To play written music, you’ll want to understand what these [...]