Habits of a Successful String Musician

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.