Developing Confidence

It’s important to develop a sense of confidence in what you can do on your instrument. If you’re always doubting what you are doing, this very doubt becomes an obstacle to playing well.

But how do you do that? Maybe if you just say “I am good at the fiddle” a hundred times a day you will become confident. But at some point, you just might not believe it’s really true. What will really make you feel confident is when you successfully take on a very small challenge and have a small victory. If you do this over and over again, day after day, you will gain confidence in your ability.

How to develop confidence with small victories:

  1. Start with something small. Simplify further if that’s too challenging.
  2. Practice until you feel confident that you can do that simple thing.
  3. Congratulations! You have just “made it” as a musician. But don’t get too comfortable. Start the process over with a new small challenge.

If you want to get good at shooting a basketball, you start by getting really good at lay-ups under the basket. Once you feel confident there, you move to a point further away and practice shooting from there. If you want to learn to meditate, start by doing it for one minute a day. If you want to eat healthier, start by eating two cookies instead of three after dinner. And with the fiddle, you want to start by getting a good basic sound on an open string, and then progress to more challenging things.

You are creating a good habit of confidence when you Work At Your Edge. In essence, you are learning to overcome a small bit of fear and uncertainty every time you play. If you do this regularly, then you will be better able to face the uncertainty and fear that might arise.

You not only have to build up confidence in your overall career as a fiddler, but you also have to build your confidence each time you start a practice.

Here a step-by-step process for warming up which will help you gain (or re-gain) confidence in your fiddling:

  • Start with getting a good sound on open strings
    • Play with drone
    • Quarter notes
      • Attention on breath
    • Rhythms
    • String crossing
  • Then get a good sound on single fingered notes
    • Play with drone
    • Quarter notes
    • Rhythms
  • Move on to Intervals (two-note exercises)
    • Start with two bows on each note
    • Add rhythms
    • Sequence intervals
      • For example, D3-A1 can be practiced in a sequence D3-A1-A3-E1
      • Add variation to the sequence
  • Scales
  • Warm-up tune
    • Start with your best tune
  • Go to current tune or technique you are learning
  • Renew with review
    • Reviewing things already you learned brings confidence
    • Read about: Renew With Review

This is a suggested course you follow as beginner. To learn more about how to practice this way read Micro and Macro Practice.

Even if you’re more advanced, it’s good to approach each practice session as a beginner. Every time you play, it’s like you’re re-living your journey as a fiddler. You may not exhaustively need to run through all these steps. Design some form of warming up that works for you.

Most beginners are in a hurry. They heard a recording by Mark O’Connor and want to sound like that. They take on challenges that are too big and than can’t understand why they don’t sound good. They play too fast because they are too focused on the goal instead of the process. The goal is just there to keep you moving.

It took me a long time to learn all this because I had to figure it out on my own (and because I’m a slow learner). I only recently discovered that there is a whole science of learning called deliberate practice. This is how I have been teaching for years (just didn’t have a name for it). If you start now with deliberate practice, you can make much faster progress than I did. Not that progress is the end-all-be-all of making music. It’s the music itself that I love, the connection to people and the universe and the process of learning. I’m not complaining, but just pointing out that I was never taught how to practice. This is the most valuable thing you can learn from FiddleHed.

Leave a Reply

9 responses to “Developing Confidence”

  1. Pingback: Renew With Review | FiddleHed

  2. I really like your specifics about practice. I guess I would be considered an intermediate player, but being mostly self-taught, there are huge gaps in my technique and the understanding of how to go about improving. My practice has been a mish-mash, confused, hit or miss affair. I really appreciate your detailed instructions on how and what to practice, broken into easy segments.
    I chose to subscribe to you over several other teachers I considered online, but I had no idea just how much you had on offer. I took one online course, a couple of years ago, which was very good, but I didn’t finish it because the lessons took you through specifc tunes, half of which I didn’t like! If you didn’t learn the tunes in order, you missed out on instruction for the next step. What’s great about your set up is that you have a long tune list and a student can choose tunes he likes and choose what things he wants to work on. This is a rich site. I am so pleased—and excited!

  3. Hello Jason, Just wanted to let you know that I continue to progress and have gained so much more confidence. I am finishing 1.5 and the lessons that you teach in getting a better sound is amazing and helped me a lot.
    Thanks Again
    Keep up the Great work Teach.
    Maryann

  4. You are AWESOME, Jason. You make everything easy to understand and that is just what I need. No Complicated lecture on all the ways to do it right.. You make it short sweet and to the point. I will definitely use this approach going forward in my journey. I have been trying to do too much and I am in too big of a hurry. I appreciate everything you do. It is very helpful.

  5. I play with a group of three other adult fiddlers once a week. I met them through a bluegrass jam but we play all kinds of fiddle tunes when we get together. Playing with others is a whole new skill. You have to listen as well as pay attention to what you are playing. We play off of sheet music but we also play from memory the tunes we know well. This can be challenging because we may have learned different versions of the same tune. We are also starting to work on some duets where we are not playing the tune in unison. We all struggle with certain things and we all mess up here and there, especially the first time we go through a tune. We’ll go through a song a few times and when it goes well it’s a beautiful thing. If I could play with them several times a week my progress would be so much faster, but in the meantime I play along with recordings, which is not as good as playing with real people but still helpful.

  6. Thanks I needed that! I have become somewhat negative about my progress. I’ve been playing for over a year now and was hoping to sound better by now. I hear so many little mistakes as I play and I suppose that’s a good thing, but I want perfection! Another thing… I am always so nervous when playing with others. How can I overcome this?