SomethingALaMode
I originally downloaded their cover track, A Little Bit of Feel Good (video below), from the great music site, Aurgasm. I had actually forgotten about them until just last night when putting together a play list on Itunes and rediscovered them by accident. SomethingALaMode consists of Thomas Roussel (violin) and Yannick Grandjean (cello). Both of [...]

Google celebrates Vivaldi’s Birthday! Read more about Vivaldi!

Once more, proof that you don’t necessarily need to play classical music to rock the violin! I discovered this video while stumbling and knew that many of you would love it! These three girls do a fantastic job, I’d like to see more from them! Does anyone else have any related videos to share?
Taken from [...]

You may have noticed either a Google warning blocking you from accessing Stringsavvy.com or just plain seeing a spam/virus installer page. According to my host this was due to an exploit in a piece of software on one of my computers. Unfortunately it did take about a week to figure out how to solve the [...]

Thanks for the positive feedback! It looks you liked the mailbag, so I’m going to keep the answers coming as long as you keep asking!
Fingers Hurt?
Angelsoos writes:
Hello Thom, I’ve watched many of your videos, and they have been very helpful.
I just got my Violin 5 days ago, which really thrilled me because I was assured [...]

The other day I was answering a question in my inbox, and I felt that many of these questions that you are asking can help other people universally! I got permission to re-post some of the most recent questions here. I would like to make you all aware of a privacy policy I just put [...]

Mark at Parttimemusician.com linked an interesting article from National Public Radio relating playing music to hearing ability.
Another cool study showing the growth of our most incredible muscle- the brain! Apparently musicians will hear and distinguish sounds better because the brain, having had more exposure, will have more tools to interpret with. This includes discerning specific [...]

I was teaching one of my students and noticed he had a habit of tensing up and making noise on his instrument every time he had made a mistake. Sometimes he would lose control in his playing, and he would respond by ultimately losing control of his temper!
I used to do this myself at a [...]

Incredible! This was shared with me by one of my friends who happens to be studying guitar performance. I actually prefer some of his theme variations over than of Jascha Heifetz! I noticed his left hand pizzicato (2:54) especially was a very different take than what I had heard before, and apparently Wikipedia agrees:
“Markov was [...]

Pianist and Violinist combo work here with an orchestra to perform Ennio Morricone’s Fistful of Dollars. Fantastic arrangement with some wicked violin solos! If you have never heard of Igudesman and Joo- check out some of their comedy bits below:

I first stumbled upon these guys a couple years ago and really enjoyed their videos. A [...]