Education - Viola

Free Resources

Many of these resources are things that I created for my students after recognizing a need for supplements to the materials that I had.  I'm on a limited budget and I like to create my own materials if it can save me from needing to buy them or making a student have to buy them.  As a forewarning, not all of these resources are of the high quality I usually strive for, as some of them I prepared for a lesson later that day and not necessarily for use later on.

Scales and Arpeggios:
(This section under construction)

Etudes and Songs:

Are You Sleeping? (Frere Jacques)
What Would You Do With a Tired Sailor?

Classical Music Transcriptions:
In order to have useable files of public domain classical pieces which both I can my students can use, I've started transcribing many different classical pieces and creating recordings for student use.  Here are a few of the files from these projects:

Bach Cello Suites for Viola (PDF's)
Bach Cello Suites for Viola on YouTube:

Worksheets:
(This section under construction)

Noteflight Accompaniments:

 Click Here to Go to the Noteflight Accompaniments Page

Other Accompaniments:
Canon in D, Transcribed for Viola:

(Download for iPod, iPad, and other Apple users)

Piano Accompaniment Only:

(Download for iPod, iPad, and other Apple users)


Zelda Theme:


Resources for Purchase

 These resources are available for purchase.  They are higher quality than the free resources, and they are projects that I have spent many years working on to help in my own personal studio.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Harmony Postlude: Mary Had a Little Lamb in Minor

Image
As a precursor to an upcoming discussion on harmonies (or a "postlude," if you will pardon the musical pun), I wanted to rewrite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" again with the same melody but different harmonies, placed in such a way to put it in a minor instead of a major key.  This wasn't too hard, as there are only three notes (4 notes in some versions) in the whole song.  Here's the minor version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb:" While this is the same exact melody, a change in the harmonies can give the song a different feel, in this case quite sinister and very dark.  Since the melody used only DO, RE, and MI in the original key, I turned these into ME, FA, and SOL for the minor version. I've utilized a similar technique for my Piano Sonata to help change the feel of different movements but to connect them together.  The first movement is in A minor and starts out in the melody with a B-flat grace note going to the tonic, A.  The second move...
Read more

Playing with Legos: My approach to teaching the major scale pattern

Image
I've recently been using a technique for teaching whole steps and half-steps with my students that I feel has been pretty effective, and I wanted to share what I do.  I mention this to my violin students after they have been playing for a little while.  I have students start with a simple tetrachord pattern (what I call the mini scale) on just one string, and from there we progress to a D major scale on the D and A strings.  When they are starting to play on more than their D and A string, I introduce them to the fact that they can do a bigger scale on their whole instrument.  At this point, I mention half steps and whole steps. I start by having students listen to the difference between half-steps and whole steps.  I currently have a piano in my teaching studio, and so I'll play them the a half-step lower down on the piano, and tell them how it is like the "Jaws" theme. I then show them the contrasting sound of a whole step and mention how in music we ha...
Read more

First Composition: Concerto No. 1

Image
Here's the first thing that I ever wrote:  Concerto No. 1.  This was a class project for my 7th grade orchestra class.  My teacher asked us to write an 8 bar melody on your instrument to be played in front of the class.  I had recently seen the movie Amadeus, and it fascinated me that someone could do what they were doing in that movie:  writing music.  I decided instead of 8 bars, I would write a full length piece for the class.  What it ended up becoming is this work: Concerto No. 1 1st Movement 2nd Movement 3rd Movement In seventh grade, we had played an arrangement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.  The influence from this piece can be very clearly seen in the 1st movement, as well as somewhat in the the third.  I wasn't sure what a concerto was at this time, and so it ended up being more like the original Baroque concertos.  In fact, the original meaning of concerto comes from the latin conserere , meaning to join ...
Read more