Ok i must share this. Today in the morning i posted couple of videos at jazz fb site in Vienna And i wanted play with somebody. French guy wrote me And invited me for the gig. I played couple of songs with them and i was absolutely terrible.got Lost in the solo, shit sound etc. EVERYTHING went Wrong. One time came guy to play with us who plays with Stochello Rosenberg,i was told😂.i Guess i pissed the v uys off a bit...Its nice to record videos at home and pretending to be able to play. Nice clash with reality...Now Its time to start properly practicing ang going to jam sessions everywhere.

Lets play a game. Here's a simple melody you probably all know (see my video). I'd love you to post your own variation of it in the comments. Then, based only on what you hear, have a guess at the musical background or influences of the person who posted above you, and the person below you. Classical? Folk? Blues? Something else? Do more than two if you're enjoying it. The idea is to show how everyone has a unique voice, and how even the simplest melody comes out differently depending on the music we each know best. Your version says something about you, whether you mean it to or not. Have fun with it!

This is something that comes up a lot for me. Some keys are easier to play, some keys are easier to think about. Often these two things have some correlation when it comes to the violin. I don't like playing in B major, because I find it hard for my brain to compute the notes, especially when there are chords that don't come from the B major scale. The vi7 for example would often be a G#7b9. Playing over this effectively is harder to think about than it is in Bb, because of the amount of sharps involved. However, B major feels pretty nice under the fingers for the violin. I think it's one of the keys where it's harder to think about than it is to actually play. This has been going through my head for years as a jazz violinist. Some people might ask "why spend so much time on a key like this if you hardly ever play tunes in B?" Well, if you want to play with singers, you might have to, for one. They often need tunes in different keys for their range, and it's nice to be ready for that. Secondly, it may not be the case that you'll play in B that often, but there will be moments within tunes where the harmony rests here for a bit. If you aren't comfortable in B at all, your solo will sound disjointed and your playing won't sound consistent. Lastly, learning to play in all keys helps solidify concepts into your brain. If you can take a simple melody through all keys, you really know it, and it's more likely to become part of your musical vocabulary. Otherwise you might just see certain lines as things that work over a certain chord in a certain key. That's fine sometimes, some stuff just works well in certain places on the instrument, but really we should strive for a distinctive sound in our playing that's consistent. It doesn't feel right to sound completely different in every key you play in. Just some thoughts... Is there a key that trips you up the most? Is it because of your thought process, or because of the technical problems you have with it?

A question for those of you who are actually out playing jazz gigs. What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you were starting out that you only really learned from playing live? Maybe it’s something about playing with a band, something you wish you had started practising earlier, dealing with nerves, playing tunes you don’t know or just anything at all about learning jazz violin. Whatever it is, drop it in the comments. here’s mine learning to improvise whilst looking at a chord chart is a different skill to learning to follow or be led along by the changes in your head and ear. Start practising this from day one and stop yourself from always looking at changes when you practise.

Hi all, I wanted to do a quick. poll, really aimed at the Premium and VIP members on here. I write out all of the etudes and some of the exercises that we do in practise club and I wanted to see how many of you actually use them. BTW They are all now bunched together in "The Library". I'm really just asking so I know how best to use my time to help you all stay practising!