How to Pursue Playing with Others as a Dedicated Amateur Violinist
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Are you a dedicated amateur violinist and you’re ready to put your skills to the test? In this post, discover how to pursue playing with others as a dedicated amateur violinist.
Many of my students have asked me, “Heather how do I pursue playing with others?” This is a definite skill set to develop. You can’t learn how to play with others if you’re only practicing at home alone. So I’m going to give you a couple of steps here.
Tomplay App
A great place to prepare yourself before you pursue playing with others is to get the app Tomplay. This way you can play with an accompaniment and keep yourself going. As a violinist playing in the practice room, you have the ability to stop and restart and stop and restart but if you’re playing with the app Tomplay, you have to keep going.
With Tomplay you can play with orchestral accompaniment or pianist, your choice and it has all different varying levels. Tomplay is a great place to start before you start pursuing to play with others.
By playing with Tomplay, you know okay yes I can play along with accompaniment because you don’t want to get together with other people and then find out that you’re really having a difficult time even playing with another part.
Discover more abouTomplay and check out how I play with Tomplay in my Tomplay post.
Prepare yourself before jumping in the fire and practice with Tomplay.
Work with a pianist
The next step in pursuing playing with others as a dedicated amateur violinist is to find a Pianist. As solo violinists, we need to play with an accompaniment more often than not. The majority of the violin repertoire is with some sort of accompaniment.
A great way to play with an accompaniment is to get yourself your own personal pianist. You may feel like well, I’m not quite ready for that, but you are! Everybody, even at the twinkle stage is ready for a Pianist to work with. You can call up the local piano teacher and ask for their recommendations of a Pianist that you can work with.
Be prepared to have to pay this pianist. It’s not going to be something that’s going to be for free unless you just happen to have a friend that’s a piano player and wants to play along with you.
If you are a serious dedicated amateur violinist, this is an expense that would be beneficial to your violin Journey. When you play with a Pianist, you want to make sure you’re prepared. How to prepare yourself is to play with the piano part via Tomplay or a youtube video and study the score. Know exactly what’s going on in both your part and the accompaniment before you meet with a Pianist.
Find fellow musicians at your level
Another great way to pursue playing with others, is to find people that are at your similar level. If you can find another violinist, you can Play Duets together. If you can find a violist or a cellist you can play duets with them as well and if you’re so lucky to have another violinist and a cellist or another violist and a cellist you can set up a little chamber Trio and play together as a string trio.
If you’re thinking, “Oh I’m not quite ready for that. I’m not Advanced enough,” there are some really beautiful chamber music pieces that are not super difficult. You can find all of your music for free at imslp.org.
You don’t have to be advanced or even a professional violinist before playing in a chamber group.
If you need some music recommendations ask your private violin teacher or set up a session with me and we can talk about some different pieces that are great for your level to play with others.
How do you find these other musicians?
You could start a Facebook group for your area of musicians in Santa Fe or dedicated amateur violinists in whatever is the name of your city. That’s a great way to start a community of amateur violinist in the area.
You can put an advertisement up at your Public Library with your phone number saying that you’re ready to pursue finding other musicians that are like you, wanting to play with others.
Play with your community orchestra
If you’re ready to take your skills to an orchestral level, you can check out your local community orchestra. Find out who is the Personnel manager of your local orchestra and call them. They will most likely ask you to audition or give you the upcoming audition dates.
You will have to learn to play orchestral excerpts at a very high level. As I have taken many auditions in the past, I’d be very happy to help you work on orchestral excerpts for auditions, just book a session.
Now if you are already playing in a community Orchestra, you have a field of opportunity to ask other musicians to play with you, to play trios or string quartets.
Once you’ve had a few rehearsals with your musician friends you could start to pursue having regular chamber coaching sessions which I absolutely love to do and these can be held online via Zoom to get coached along your way as a budding string Trio or string quartet. Have fun pursuing playing with others. Ciao.
Happy Magical Practices,
Heather is a classically trained concert violinist residing in Bulgaria. She received her BM violin performance degree from CU-Boulder, studied with top teachers including Rachel Barton Pine. Heather has held leadership positions with multiple orchestras in the Greater Chicago-Milwaukee area. She has instructed millions of violinists globally via Youtube videos, online academies, group coaching and one on one sessions. Heather’s students have won multiple awards, concerto competitions, held concertmaster positions in orchestras and even performed in Carnegie Hall. Heather is an advocate of a holistic violin lifestyle – putting one’s mind, body and spirit as a violin journey priority.
Please share in the comments which above tips you will be implementing into your daily practices sessions.
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