My flight from Singapore was from 8am in the morning, so I woke up at around 5:30am and got a lift from Kyoko to the airport.

It was not very busy at this time of the morning so we got to the airport quickly. The temperature was pretty much the same. I had a shower in the morning so I would be fresh for the flight.

It was very tasty and it was a while since I had fresh soy bean drink.

The first thing I did was to rent a sim card for my Japanese mobile phone. Followed by that, I went to post my luggage to my hotel.

It took a very long time mainly because of two people in front of me being unsure of what ticket to buy and not having internet access. I think i was kept waiting for over an hour. It only took 5 minutes to get my rail pass once it was my turn to be served.

I ended up sitting in an empty seat until the ticket man came to check the tickets and i bought an unreserved seat ticket from him.

A couple gave me some advice about what to do with the issue with the ticket, so I gave each of them a koala keychain that i bought at the souvenir shop.

Since the train ended at Nippori, it was actually quite convenient for me as there was a JR train line that takes me to the

– Posted from an iPad

I left home about 11-12am for my 3pm flight getting a lift from my dad.

I rang my friend Jennifer to meet up. It seemed that according to the airport staff that if I went outside the terminal to meet them, then I’d only be able to get back in in the morning after getting a boarding pass.

I did an online violin jam session with other beginner violinists around the world (mainly the US) on Saturday night. We used Google Hangouts (part of Google+) and it was suprisingly good. We were able to play songs we shared with each other and some Suzuki songs in sync and we also took turns playing some of the songs we’ve been working on.

It was really interesting to see what other violin beginners were learning, and I realized the Suzuki songs really sound quite nice! I’ll have to try play some more of them for fun.

Fortunately google released a Google+ app update on the iPad that adds Google Hangouts support, so it was really easy to set up. I just connected my Blue Yeti USB condenser mic to my iPad and I mounted the iPad onto a music stand faced at me.

I’m looking forward to doing another one, but I’m going on holidays soon, so the next one for me may be after I come back.

Last night so I did some violin sightreading of a piece that was on a facebook violin beginners forum.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They are planning on getting a group on Google hangouts (from Google+) to play it, but I think they may have issues with latency that will prevent us from playing in sync.

I think I screwed up the counting as it’s meant to be in 6/8 time and I didn’t even look at the time signature before playing it. I also missed out all the repeats! Oh well.

I’ll have to practice it along to my metronome and see if it improves.

I just bought a guitar pedal (Zoom G1X) for my electric violin (Yamaha SV-200). Now my electric violin makes a lot of funky sounds when playing instead of a boring amplified tone.

I find playing in an electric violin harder because every mistake is amplified, so you have to play cleanly or everyone can hear you accidentally brush on the wrong string or when you’re playing out of tune.

Does anyone here have an electric violin? Do you have any hints on different ways to play it?

Currently I’ve decided on doing cello lessons about once a fortnight and have a 1 hours session with my violin teacher where half is for the cello lesson and the other half is for the violin lesson.

I had my second cello lesson yesterday and I learnt quite a bit from it. I had practiced my bowing and as a result my bowing was quite good when I played some open strings for my teacher.

However, it seems that I was not bowing straight and in the ideal area to make the strings vibrate more resonant. My teacher corrected my bowing arm movement as I bowed so that when doing a full bow across the strings, the bow would be still straight.

I also did some exercises from my cello book to practice string crossing which is a lot more challenging on cello as the difference in movement to perform a string crossing on the tip and on the base of the bow is quite large.

I was then shown to sit up straight on the chair as I was slouching and shown the proper position to finger the cello strings. Apparently my arm was too far back to hold down the strings properly so after being shown to simply shift my entire arm forward, it was much easier to finger the strings. I had to keep in mind to keep the thumb behind my 2nd finger and use it as a pivot when switching between the 1st and 3rd & 4th fingers on the strings.

We then worked on a few simple pieces involving the notes on the D string and also some on the A string. I was taught some finger exercises by simply pressing down the string with my fingers and lifting them to strengthen them. I think this is especially important for the 4th finger which is quite weak.

So I have a lot of stuff to practice on the cello. I plan to practice it slowly and ensure that I use good technique and make a good tone rather than playing up to speed.

I’m really enjoying learning the cello.

When I initially got the cello, I had a play around with it initially and managed to break the A string the following day when tuning. The pegs were slipping and that resulted in the broken string. I tried replacing one with another spare A string but broke that too!!

Anyways, I took it to the music shop that I bought my violin from and the repair man took a look at it for me. Apparently the cello had been through a lot and had even had major repairs made to it in the past. He refitted all of the pegs and fixed a crack for me. Suprisingly enough the repairs only cost $20, although the replacement A string cost me $50! There was some buzzing when I received the cello, but it seems to be gone after the servicing.

After getting it serviced at the music shop I have had no more issues with the cello.

I had my first cello lesson last Thursday!
Learnt how to hold between my knees and adjust the height the cello to the right height.
I also started on some fingering on it. Seems that the hand position is different and is important because you have to use your little finger to hold down the string too, and if you don’t have the hand position right, it’s too difficult to push the string down with the little finger.
Did a little bit of bowing too, but that was more on the difference between violin and cello bowing.

My violin teacher often says that I’m progressing very quickly almost every lesson. She says most people usually spend 2 years before they get to where I am. Still, I think I have to be careful with progressing too fast as my technique can and often does suffer if I don’t practice enough. At the moment, I have to practice quite a bit to keep at the pace I’m at. I think the ability to identify what I’m doing wrong and self correcting (which I learnt from Karate) is helping a lot with learning the violin techniques. Being able to hear when I’m playing something out of tune is also very helpful. I blame my out of tune piano for that useful skill.

A couple of weeks ago I did a jam session with Joseph on his Oud and viola with me on the piano and violin. It reminded me that I still need to work on counting correctly when playing. He showed me how to count and play to a metronome. I’ve decided to ignore my piano teacher’s advice of not using a metronome and have begun to use one in my practice. My violin teacher asked me to start practicing to one too, so I am starting to incorporate one in my practice. I think playing to my own timing too much has made me unable to play along to someone else’s timing.

I remember another friend showed me the same counting techniques previously. I wish I did something about my counting issue then instead of leaving it till now. It has improved since then, but I’m still not happy with it.

There is a new anime this season that is about Jazz.
It’s called Sakamichi no Apollon or Kids on the slope.

It’s gotten me interested in Jazz and made me practice some of my more blues and jazz pieces from the simply music song list a bit more.
On another note, Jazz is hard as it’s very theory based, but it’s more fun to play than classical because you’re not constrained to playing from the music sheet and can improvise and try different things based on the chord progression.

I found an interesting jazz piano website in Japanese where they take some popular songs, analyze it and then turn it into a jazz arrangement of it. I’ll be checking it out to see if I can learn something from it.

Still currently thinking of getting one of those multi effects pedals for my electric violin. I still haven’t decided on one yet, but thinking of getting a 2nd hand Zoom G1X pedal.