Tim Rohwer: Composer

 A quick update to the blog:  I'm beginning to put together a bunch of little supplemental songs to help young beginning students with note reading and technique skills.  They are going to have silly titles and will address one or two technique or note reading issues at a time to help offset some of the basic problems I've been finding come up with students as they try to learn violin.  The supplemental songs page is still under development, but we be available through my education page  (currently just for Violin , but eventually other instruments as well) so these resources can start to be used by students right away. They are designed to be bigger in size to make it easier to read, and are going to have little accompaniment files to go with them so the student can hear the melody and play along.  These resources will eventually be published in a booklet, but for now I am making them available up here for free so that I can get some feedback from ...

One of my professors (Dr. Ted Ashton) used to refer to ways to teach concepts as your "bag of tricks."  As you would teach more, you would continue to develop this "bag of tricks" so that in many different situations you would be able to teach lots of concepts in many different ways.  In addition to coming up with your own bag of tricks, it can be really useful to find out the ways other teachers teach the same concepts.  This especially useful since students will all think in a variety of ways, and it may be that the way one teacher teaches a concept is easier for one student to understand than the way you teach it. I'd like to start sharing some of my "bag of tricks," as I've begun to find some very effective ways of teaching certain concepts.  Today I wanted to focus on some approaches I've had to teaching scales to beginning students.  Some of this may take longer than a lesson to discuss with a student, and I find that sometimes we have...

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...

I've recently updated my music education section with sight reading exercises for Violin.  I use these pretty regularly with students who are on the point of being able to read notes to start them out with some very short and simple things to play to help them read lots of the same notes over and over again. These pages, in conjunction with the All for Strings books by Gerald Anderson and Robert Frost, have been a great way to help beginning students with their note reading skills. They're still a work in progress, and the eventual goal will be to get them to the point where they can be stuck in a book for beginning students to use as daily warm-ups for note reading.  The pdf's on this sight are still in their early stages and need some refinement, but you can feel free to use them as you wish.  All of these resources will eventually also be made for use with Viola and Cello in the near future.  Here is the Link:   Educational Resources for Violin The orga...