Mr. Sean's Music Quest June 2019

Mr. Sean tries to be artsy in an attempt to lure readers.

Recently I decided to try to muster up some discipline for practicing musical instruments like I used to do in middle school and high school. I have chosen three instruments to focus on with the greatest emphasis being on the violin, then the banjo, and finally the clarinet. I have chosen to spend the most energy on violin as I see it as a challenge and I like challenges. So far I have re-purposed a notebook I was going to use for math or meteorology stuff and created a daily practice log for the violin and the banjo (there's a separate one for clarinet, but keep reading and you'll see why I'm not focusing so much on clarinet at the moment). Each day I have a task and a goal for each instrument and despite my general musical ability being quite proficient, I have to start out with the basics for the banjo and the violin. For banjo it's transitioning between the G chord (open strings) to the D7 chord (for banjo, do not play high G and place pointer on the first fret space of the second (B) string and the middle finger on the second fret space of the middle string (low G) while for violin I'm going through Essential Elements for Strings and have been stuck on page 9 trying to make the A string make a sound while my fingers are on the D string ready to play a G. The low emphasis on clarinet, despite me writing up a separate log for it is that I already have a decade of playing experience and although I still have a lot that I can learn, playing catch up on getting to a high baseline isn't as hard as learning an instrument from scratch. It remains to be seen how well I'll get along with the banjo and the violin, but I can say that practicing does help and taking advice from a friend whose main instrument is the violin is also of help. Now I just need to get me a shoulder rest so I can stand a chance at playing the violin with closer to correct form.

Maybe if I spend more time I can try to come up with definitive goals on each of the instruments.

For example, even though I don't have an A soprano clarinet (instead I have a standard B flat soprano), I think trying to learn Mozart's Clarinet Concerto (at least the solo clarinet parts) is a worthy goal. For violin, I don't have a definitive goal yet, just that I can be able to play something of substance. Then for banjo, I kid you not, one of my goals is to be able to play the banjo part of Dueling Banjos, as I must only seek victory from a challenge that involves that song.