Zigeunerweisen | Part Time Musician . com

Posts tagged: Zigeunerweisen

YouTube for musicians: technique

This is the third in a series of articles about using YouTube to accomplish your goals as a musician. Many of these goals overlap, but today, we’ll try to keep our focus to using YouTube to learn technique.

There are numerous ways to learn new technique on your chosen instrument. Some things require a great deal of effort working with a good instructor to really learn and master. Others can be absorbed easily after just a short demonstration. In either case – and in all cases that fall between them – a good demonstration can really facilitate learning to do something new with your instrument…or just learning to do something better.

Our youngest performed Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen with two area orchestras when she was 13 years old. Anyone who knows violin repertoire understands the difficulty associated with this piece, and our daughter worked very hard to learn it. Along the way, she spent a great deal of time observing the “masters” playing this piece…and one way she did that was via YouTube.

While this video could also fall under the “inspiration” category, Itzhak Perlman demonstrates a great deal of technique in it. Between Mr. Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, and others, we had sources-a-plenty to which to turn for visual and audible guidance, in addition to the excellent tutelage of our violin instructor, a professional violinist herself. But back to YouTube.

This video is instructive throughout, but if you want to preview why video/audio demonstrations can contribute so greatly to learning new technique, skip to 7:50 and watch to the end. Once you do that, you’ll probably want to watch it from the beginning to see what you missed in the build-up.

Getting a sound or technique into your “mind’s eye” can help you get there, provided you put in the work to learn and master it. YouTube is a great way to do that, offering opportunities to see and hear experts demonstrate what you’re trying to learn whenever it is convenient for you…and as many times as is necessary. Can it be done without YouTube? Of course. Can you build a highway using only hand tools? How much time do you have?