Habits of a Successful String Musician, Second Edition is 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. The Second Edition now includes a rhythm canon for combining various articulations and new melodic exercises for developing tone, blend, vibrato, spiccato, and sautillé.
• Part II. Left Hand Patterns, Positions, and Shifting: Left-hand exercises are now 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 position. 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 twelve major and minor keys. The Second Edition has improved cello and bass fingerings and includes bass scales with C-extensions.
• Part IV. Chorales: There are now 50 percent 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.

Christopher Selby is the Director of High School Orchestras at the Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina. A veteran school orchestra director, he has taught elementary, middle, and high school orchestras for thirty years, and his orchestras have performed at the Midwest Clinic and twice been named Grand Champion in the Public School Division of ASTA’s National Orchestra Festival. An active conductor, clinician, and adjudicator, Dr. Selby has been a leader in both NAfME and ASTA. He holds degrees from The Hartt School and the University of South Carolina.

Scott Rush is the founder of the Habits series for GIA Publications. A graduate of the New England Conservatory and the University of South Carolina, Mr. Rush is active as a clinician and adjudicator throughout the United States.