Habits of a Successful String Musician is a tremendous resource for string teachers and students. It is comprehensive, well thought-out and offers strong pedagogical tools while allowing for individual teaching styles and priorities. For me, “Habits” is a time-saver and a great catalyst for teachable moments with my students on technique and broad string playing concepts in the classroom.

—Scott Laird, Music Instructor and Fine Arts Coordinator NC School of Science and Math

Habits of a Successful String Musician is a terrific educational resource and supplemental book for advanced middle and high school string students. I found the tuning canons and sight-reading to be particularly effective. My students have enjoyed all the exercises, and I have found them very useful in assembling their focus and preparing them to play high level repertoire.

— Jonathan Glawe, Director of String Studies Pioneer High School, Ann Arbor, MI; 2013 ASTA National Orchestra Festival Grand Champion

Habits of a Successful String Musician is a field-tested, vital, and—most importantly—musical collection of almost 400 sequenced exercises for building fundamentals. Perfect to use with the entire string orchestra or solo player at virtually any skill level, this series contains carefully sequenced warm-ups, sight-reading etudes, rhythm vocabulary studies, chorales, tuning canons, and much more. In one place, this series collects everything an aspiring player needs to build fundamental musicianship skills and then be able to transfer those skills directly into the performance of great literature.

Habits of a Successful String Musician:

• Presents a differentiated, sequential, and comprehensive method for developing skills that lead to the mastery of reading rhythms, and ultimately, to musical sight-reading.
• Creates a method for teaching scales, arpeggios and thirds that simultaneously accommodates students of different ability levels.
• Organizes tone, rhythm and articulation patterns into a flexible and sequential series.
• Creates finger pattern and velocity studies that address the most common problems encountered by intermediate orchestra students.
• Provides beginning through advanced shifting exercises for students of every level.
• Creates exercises for learning alternate clefs and higher positions.
• Provides chorales for the development of intonation, tone quality, blend and musicianship.
• Presents rhythm charts in a new format that allows transfer from timing and rhythm to pitches in a musical context.
• Provides audition sight-reading in a classroom “full ensemble” format that is well planned in scope and sequence. There are over 130 sight-reading examples in this book.
• Promotes the idea that students should cross the threshold from the “technical components of playing” to music making.

Habits of a Successful String Musician is the answer to the very simple question: “What should I be learning during fundamentals time?”

A full preview is available online for the Violin book.  

Christopher Selby is Director of String Studies at the Charleston County School of the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina and is a graduate of The Hartt School. Scott Rush is the Director of Bands at Wando High School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina and is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. Rich Moon teaches elementary music in the Charleston (SC) School District.