Habits of a Successful String Musician

A complete method of over 400 musical exercises for teaching upper-level string students the technical skills needed to play advanced orchestral music. Perfect for an entire string orchestra or solo player, this series contains carefully sequenced warm-ups, sight-reading etudes, rhythm vocabulary studies, chorales, tuning canons, and much more. It includes everything an aspiring string musician needs to build musicianship skills and then transfer those skills into the performance of great literature.

 

What's new in the second edition?

 

Part I. Tone and Articulation: The open-string exercises and bowing variations remain invaluable tools for teaching articulation skills. This edition now includes a rhythm canon for combining various articulations and new melodic exercises for developing tone, blend, vibrato, spiccato, and sautille.

 

Part II. Left-Hand Patterns, Positions, and Shifting: Left-hand exercises are organized into a sequence of musical exercises and etudes that review middle-level skills, extend up to the highest registers, and teach alternate clefs and thumb positions. A new Intermediate Positions curriculum teaches young cellists the shifting skills required for keys with more than three sharps or flats. A new sequence of two-octave arpeggios in ten keys improves students' range and fluency across the instrument. The Advanced Positions pages contain new etudes for teaching the chromatic scale, diminished arpeggios, harmonics, thumb position, alternate clefs, and other challenging skills seen in advanced orchestral repertoire.

 

Part III. Scales, Arpeggios, and Thirds: This section still has the much-loved tuning canons and chords, dominant arpeggios, and thirds as well as one-, two-, and three-octave scales and arpeggios in all 12 major and minor keys. Cello and bass fingerings are improved, and bass scales with C extensions are included.

 

Part IV. Chorales: There are now 50% more chorales in a greater variety of keys and from more diverse cultural backgrounds.

 

Parts V. Rhythm Study in a Musical Context and VI. Sight-Reading: These sections contain 185 completely new rhythm charts and sight-reading exercises with tempo markings for each exercise. This well-sequenced curriculum teaches students how to count and decipher rhythms and then transfer rhythmic literacy to melodic sight-reading in a musical context.

 

Part VII. Orchestral Excerpts: This brand-new section includes three pages of excerpts from frequently performed school and all-state repertoire. Sequenced from moderately difficult to expert, these excerpts are the perfect culmination of skills taught in this method and are ideal for auditions or final exams. Additional sectional pages in each student book focus on technique and alternate clef lessons unique to each instrument.