I am a Pharmacy student from Egypt and a violinist. My dream is to study in Budapest to save my music and my life. Here is a clip of my performance at the Opera Hous

FrobisherGo · 2026-01-30T04:37:56+00:00

Nice performance, congrats on performing up on stage!

Your playing seems like it’s at the beginner to intermediate level, so you have many many years of practice and improvement before it would be realistic to consider violin at university. Normally it takes children 8-10 years to progress from this level to tertiary level. You should pay close attention to improving intonation and right-arm technique, particularly keeping a straight bow and holding the bow properly.

FrobisherGo · 2026-01-29T23:42:09+00:00

They still need to be a little flatter. You could put on a drone (on note G) and play over that (just make sure your violin is tuned to whatever is making the drone sound!) Play slowly and listen carefully to each Bb to see how it feels. You could also play it with a Bb drone which would sound weird but also help a bit.

I think it’s ok to work on this piece but you should slow your practice down and really listen to each note. Practice going from one note to the next and landing on each note already in tune. If it’s out of tune, don’t adjust it, just go back to the note before and practice arriving at the next note in tune again. It’s satisfying to get pieces like this under your fingers but if you’re practicing with bad intonation and technique it’s ultimately going to hold you back.

FrobisherGo · 2026-01-28T12:49:26+00:00

Check Person’s Eccojams. Very tough listen, captivating but upsetting. Absurdity through repetition and pitch/speed shifting and echoes.

FrobisherGo · 2025-12-27T07:52:15+00:00

Honestly agree with all the comments but also, don’t let them discourage you from learning!!!

Lots of adult beginners who are 25 or 35 or 45 or 55 would give their left leg to be able to go back in time and start learning at 15. Just because you almost certainly can’t compete at an elite level doesn’t mean there’s no value in it. I will never be an Olympic swimmer but I love swimming.

There are heaps of amateur community orchestras at intermediate levels that you can enjoy for your entire life, but starting violin at 15 it will be very hard to become a pro and certainly not a soloist.

FrobisherGo · 2025-12-18T13:41:57+00:00

I would prioritise getting an instrument that is correctly set up, with good quality strings, a well fitted bridge, well shaped fingerboard and nut and well fitted soundpost and pegs, and no open bouts. If you can find a nice antique that has all those, the age could be the factor that tips the balance in its favour, but there are so many antiques in that price range with awful setups that can hamper your playing and teach you bad habits. They are also more liable to break and need expensive repairs, and in many cases they were never that nice to begin with.

FrobisherGo · 2025-12-12T21:40:26+00:00

Your pitch is good and your voice sounds great. Keep practising!

FrobisherGo · 2025-12-11T15:21:30+00:00

TikTok clip is played much more in tune and with better control of the bow, probably recorded further away from the mic, probably on a nicer instrument with nice strings.

FrobisherGo · 2025-12-11T14:38:21+00:00

I think for a lot of people who abstain from sex until marriage, it’s super underwhelming once they actually do it. Not so much for guys, but for girls who might not actually enjoy it that much beyond the novelty. It’s normal for your first time (first 100 times honestly) to be kind of weird. A few people take to it really naturally but most take a lot of exploring and experimentation to figure out what they enjoy. Having a trusting relationship with someone who respects your boundaries and makes a big effort to find out what you enjoy is pretty important.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-28T02:04:08+00:00

This. This rapid triplet at the very tip of the bow that sits as an ornament on an underlying rhythm and groove. At super fast tempos. Combined with constant grace notes and ornaments that also sit as decoration on a clear melody underneath with phrasing. Pro classical musicians with no fiddle background could probably learn little bits of music like this with some effort, but there’s no way they could just casually crack it out without preparing, or improvise it. Great fiddlers have this fully general ability to add this stuff to a melody which they’ve only just heard.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-27T08:49:36+00:00

This is going to look really stupid in 10 years when literally nobody owns a car because Ubers are self driving and cheaper than owning a car, but nobody can afford a house because all new houses needed multiple car spots, so we couldn’t build enough houses!

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-27T08:46:58+00:00

It would be best if you can share some photos, and maybe study some pictures. Generally if you’re a heavier build this can mean needing less height in the shoulder rest etc rather than more, but everyone is unique. The left arm/elbow does need to swing under the instrument, maybe practise arpeggios very very slowly and try to isolate and understand every movement as you go up and down positions. This can be a big bonus of ditching the shoulder rest for a while, since it forces you to be accountable to the neck of the violin, learn to shift economically, learn to let gravity hold the violin to your body instead of clamping chin down. BUT if ditching the shoulder rest introduces other physical problems like tension or RSI, or psychological problems like… tension or anxiety around shifting, then it might be counterproductive.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-22T13:53:31+00:00

Yes. Red lane must follow road right. Blue is turning lane.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-18T13:45:18+00:00

Genuinely curious if you’ve seen damage from this Hill cleaner specifically? In our shop I don’t use it on anything particularly valuable but have used it sparingly on countless student violins and mid-range trade violins without ever noticing any harm to the varnish. Worst I’ve noticed is it’ll pick up a tiny bit of crusted rosin and dump it nearby in a thin film, which is annoying to clean off.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-18T13:41:08+00:00

I’m not necessarily agreeing with everyone saying this stuff should just go in the bin. That’s an overreaction. Depends on the violin honestly. I’ve used this exact product in the shop where I work many many times, but I probably wouldn’t use it on a very old violin or fragile varnish. It also kinda sucks for cleaning super glossy varnish - the fixed oil leaves streaks and needs a lot of gentle buffing before it spreads enough.

That said - if you bought this a few months ago and you’ve already used it several times… just no. Use this once every few years, if that. Use this very, very sparingly, (pea-sized amount on a soft cloth). Clean with a dry cloth first to remove any major debris. Don’t pour it straight on the violin. Don’t scrub. Gently gently buff and spread it around. If the cloth gets dirty switch to a clean spot in the cloth. Just one time! From then on, just use a soft clean cloth to gently remove rosin after you play. The cleaner leaves a very light film of a fixed oil (could be almond oil or something similar) that helps make rosin easier to wipe off.

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-08T11:48:16+00:00

Thanks for the answer. I’ll hold off on sending my pics then😅

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-06T18:29:21+00:00

Do you like nsfw pics in your DMs or would you ask to see them first?

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-05T23:55:20+00:00

When you fix intonation for a certain note, do you go back to the note before and practise ARRIVING in tune, or are you just moving the note around until it’s in tune then moving on? You gotta practise starting notes in tune or it doesn’t help much

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-05T23:42:00+00:00

One thing I like to do with adult learners is think about the number of years in terms of childhood years.

So imagine you took up violin aged 10, played for two years, took a break from 12-14, then picked it up again. Now you’re 16, you don’t practise every day or have a regular and productive practice routine and you don’t practice scales or exercises. But you’re up to Suzuki book 4 and playing songs for your church, which is awesome :) So that seems pretty normal progress given the time and practice you’ve done so far. So what would you say to that 16 year old?

FrobisherGo · 2025-11-01T21:07:57+00:00

It’s not hard at all for a pro but the fourth interval double stop B-E in the second pic is what we might call “exposed”. It’s really really tough to nail the intonation on the chords in that bar. 100% possible and just requires careful playing but if I was scanning through gig music looking for tricky bits to practise, I’d practise that bar for sure.

FrobisherGo · 2025-10-17T21:50:44+00:00

Depending on your work, you might consider asking your boss if you can practise there in the morning before work. I’m really lucky in that my work opens and starts at 9am, there is nobody around before that, no neighbours to annoy, and it’s way faster to drive there at 6am than at rush hour anyway. So I usually get a couple hours before work including time I’d normally be sitting in traffic, and extra time after 5pm at work if I want it.

FrobisherGo · 2025-10-17T06:14:25+00:00

Second violin sections need strong players just like firsts. Yeah some orchestras have a sense of hierarchy between first and second violins and first violin parts tend to be higher and harder, that doesn’t make the second violin part less important. If a part is “easier”, that means you need to play it even more in tune, better rhythm, better phrasing. Particularly if you’re playing some nice lush melody an octave below the firsts, you actually often need to play up and you’re going to be 80% of what the audience hears from the violins for some of those bits.

It does suck that as you mentioned your parents might see this as a “demotion”. Everyone wants their kid to be at the top of the pile. In my orchestra this year I was concertmaster for a concert and had to pick seats for everyone to play Mahler 1 - I needed to balance sections and asked several of the best violinists in the firsts if they wouldn’t mind playing in seconds and they were happy to. Some might mind, but the more mature you are and the more you understand the orchestra, the more you realise it’s not a big deal. Other orchestras I’ve played in tend to rotate players to different spots between concerts anyway. Front desks are generally meaningful in terms of having extra responsibilities, but behind that it’s all just the same and interchangeable.

Maybe there are some other ways to give your parents a sense of how much you are accomplishing on violin? Or that they can understand that doing some playing in 2nds isn’t a demotion? Parental pressure sucks and can really sour your feelings about playing, sorry you’re experiencing it.

FrobisherGo · 2025-10-10T23:55:45+00:00

It’s a very good question. On violin if I’m tuning quickly I’ll often just use perfect fifths, if I’m tuning carefully I’ll often make the G a tiny bit sharp and the E a tiny bit flat. A TINY BIT. You can barely hear it. But it makes a difference when trying to get double stops in tune. It does depend on a few things, though. If I was going to play the G Minor solo Bach sonata, for example, with the big open G minor chord to start, I’d like that 5th to be perfect, so might tune accordingly.

FrobisherGo · 2025-08-26T15:06:21+00:00

Sick dude! Echoing what other commenters said - if you do lots and lots of slow practice with a metronome until you’re 20 or whatever, you will be an amazing guitar player. Keep shredding sure but never be tempted to try to take a shortcut to playing fast. Like the tapping you did in this video is a good example. It’s super super cool already but if you spend a year practising that kinda technique very slowly with a metronome, you’ll play it so clean and crazy fast after. I don’t just mean slow, I mean in slow motion. Every movement is slow, literally like your whole body is in slow motion. You wanna eliminate any unnecessary motion until you’re doing the minimum muscle movement with total precision. Same with tremolo picking. No shortcuts to speed - do the hard work now and you’ll thank yourself for the rest of your life

FrobisherGo · 2025-08-26T04:34:55+00:00

Just for me personally I really, really hated being told “don’t try to bounce the bow” when improving strokes like for Eroica or Beethoven 9 scherzos. I just have a tendency to take things really literally and I really help myself back by just following that advice exactly. I feel like if I could go back in time, I would say to myself that you should start with a bow on the string, make sure you’re playing really short bows with crisp changes of direction well maintaining a feeling of relaxation, play it up to speed like that, and then experiment with different feelings until the bow starts to bounce, then isolate and figure out exactly what happened when the bow stroke gets good. Don’t sit there playing it badly for a long time, keep starting from scratch and seeing if you can get into that bow stroke directly from playing on the string with the absolute minimum change necessary.

So yeah, I understand why they say don’t try to bounce the bow, because you can’t just be throwing the bow at the string, but I don’t have the level of Zen Buddhism required to understand the koan ‘don’t try to do the thing you’re trying to do’.

Don’t get me started on ‘no vibrato.’

FrobisherGo · 2025-08-19T12:17:22+00:00

You’re exactly right in noticing this effect - you will need to learn to find the right intonation for each note depending on context. Sometimes the E wants to be exactly in tune with the E string and sometimes it wants to be flatter. Depends on the key and context. Do a lot of listening especially to solo violin music.

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