Some people ask me how I have time to practice all the instruments I play. First of all, I play primarily stringed instruments, and there are some similarities between many of them. And second of all, I don’t practice each instrument daily. I practice the instrument or instruments I’ll be playing in upcoming performances daily, and when I take on a new instrument I practice daily in order to establish some muscle memory for the instrument.
Playing fretted instruments that vary in string number, neck
width, and fretboard length, is not too big an issue. If I’ve played a lot of tenor
banjo, and then pick up a guitar, I find myself undershooting the strings and
frets for a few minutes until I adjust. But the strumming is the same as the
mandolin, and even the chord shapes are, since each are tuned in 5ths. Likewise,
mandolin to violin has the same general string length, and the same tuning, but
the position is different for the left hand, and then there’s the bow… And so
on.
But the fact is that once you know the tuning, develop the
muscle memory for getting from note to note, and develop good technique for
playing smoothly and musically, and with good tone, you can learn to play
anything. I don’t have any experience with wind or brass instruments, so I have
always limited myself to things that don’t require air (other than singing),
and my most difficult instrument so far to get a good grasp on is the
concertina. The layout of the notes is not only confusing at first, but there
is a different note when you push the bellows than when you pull. So a lot to
keep track of. It’s not at all intuitive for me.
Having a background in piano (since age 4) certainly helped
in more than one way: I learned to read both treble and bass clef, and I
learned to do coordinate left and right hand doing different things. This is
why it’s great to start children on piano first. My parents told us we can
choose our second instrument in the 3rd grade as long as we had at
least 2 years of piano. I chose violin.
I’ve noticed that my adult harp students who played a melody
instrument growing up, and not piano, have a more difficult time with learning to
read the bass clef, and with putting both hands on the harp to play separate
things. But there is hope even for those students! I have a book series for
harp that takes a student through all they need to learn to get that two-hand
coordination. The series is called “Harp Newbies” and is available on my
website at: https://verlene.com/books.html#newbies
Back to things with strings, here are some videos of me
playing several of my instruments:
Enjoy!
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