THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT ONLINE VIOLIN LESSONS
ABSURDITIES OF MUSIC EDUCATION
There is a peculiar irony in watching people search for a local violin teacher because they assume physical proximity will somehow give them a better chance of learning the violin properly, while I spend a significant part of my working time online reconstructing technique that was previously learned face-to-face.
I teach violin online, and I regularly find myself working with someone who has already spent years having violin lessons, played repertoire, taken examinations and progressed through grades, yet still does not understand some of the most fundamental processes in their own playing.
I am not talking about sophisticated interpretation, professional ambitions or concert-level violin playing. I mean the foundation: rhythm, intonation, sound production, physical organisation, coordination, and an understanding of what acceptable quality actually sounds and feels like.
A student may have repertoire behind them, examination results and several grades completed, yet when we begin looking closely, we can find ourselves working with things that belong at the very foundation of playing.
This is one of the absurdities of violin education that I have been observing for years, and it has become increasingly difficult for me to leave it unspoken.
THE STANDARD COMES FIRST
One of the things I keep observing is that a person can spend years playing the violin and still not understand precisely what they are trying to achieve. They may have played repertoire, taken exams and progressed through grades, yet have no sufficiently developed internal standard for rhythm, intonation, sound quality or technical control.
If you do not understand the standard you are working towards, it becomes extremely difficult to evaluate your own practice. You need to know what is acceptable, what requires further work, why the result sounds the way it does and how far you need to investigate before moving on.
On the violin, this becomes particularly important because the instrument gives you very little for free. You create the conditions for the result yourself, and “close enough” can very easily become the quality you repeatedly reproduce.
This is why I am interested in what a person actually does while practising: what they observe, what they hear, what they feel, what they are trying to change, and how accurately they understand the relationship between their actions and the result.
APPARENTLY, THE BODY IS INVOLVED
Another thing that still amazes me is meeting people who have played violin for years without really knowing how to observe what is happening inside their own body while they play.
It seems absurd when written down. You are producing music through a physical playing system, yet years can be spent concentrating on notes, repertoire, examinations and corrections while the internal physical process remains largely unexplored.
Your musical intention has to become physical before anybody can hear it. If you have no idea what to feel, what to observe, how to recognise unnecessary tension or how a change in physical organisation affects the result, you are missing an enormous source of information about your own playing.
This is where violin technique becomes much more interesting to me than a collection of instructions about where something should be placed. The real work is developing the ability to observe yourself with enough precision to understand what is happening and eventually regulate it.
That ability changes practice completely.
THE SCREEN CAN BECOME A MIRROR
This is where online violin lessons became particularly interesting to me.
The screen can become a mirror.
During an online violin lesson, I direct the student’s attention towards what they need to observe in themselves. We can take something apart almost at an atomic level, examine what is happening, find the relevant information and build a chain of observation around it: what deserves attention, what changes the result, what needs to be reproduced and what the student needs to recognise independently.
When the student is alone with the violin between lessons, this chain of observation becomes the real work. I am teaching the student how to practise without me in the room, how to look at themselves, how to listen, how to understand what is happening and how to regulate the process instead of repeating movements and hoping for a different result.
My observation gradually becomes their self-observation.
This is one of the greatest strengths I have found in online violin teaching. The student is already learning in an environment remarkably close to the one in which most of their development will actually happen: alone with the instrument, responsible for their own attention. Through the screen I can direct that attention with enormous precision, while the student learns how to reproduce the same process independently.
PHYSICAL PROXIMITY IS NOT A TEACHING METHOD
A teacher can be physically beside you while you continue misunderstanding something fundamental. A teacher can be on the other side of a screen and identify the piece of information that changes your understanding of what you have been trying to do for years.
What matters is the depth and precision of the learning process, and what the student eventually becomes able to understand and reproduce independently. You can find a teacher locally and still find yourself in a situation where the teaching available to you is based on a very basic understanding of the instrument or of how to teach it. The fact that somebody is physically nearby does not add depth to the information they can give you.
The more I observe this from both the teacher’s and the student’s perspective, the more obvious it becomes that the modality itself matters far less than the quality of communication between them. A lesson is a two-way process: the teacher observes from one side, the student experiences the playing system from the inside, and both are curious to understand what is happening, what is getting in the way, and how to make the intended sound possible in that particular student’s hands. This shared search for the solution is where the real work happens. Face-to-face or online is simply the format in which that conversation takes place.
EXPERT TEACHING BELONGS AT THE BEGINNING
Expert knowledge belongs at the beginning of violin education, including when somebody wants to play entirely for pleasure. Your ambitions can determine how far you eventually choose to go; they should not determine the quality of the foundation you begin with.
Violin does not become technically simpler because you call it a hobby. You may want to play at home, join a community orchestra, make music with friends or reach a level at which you can play something you love and actually enjoy the result. You still need to produce the sound, organise rhythm, hear and control intonation, and understand how your own playing system works.
Basic violin playing already requires very specific knowledge. A student can spend years struggling with the same elements and gradually develop self-doubt around an instrument that has a remarkable capacity to make intelligent adults question their own abilities.
How far you eventually take the violin is a matter of ambition. The quality of the knowledge you begin with affects everything that follows.
PRACTICE IS A CHAIN OF OBSERVATION
Most violin development happens between lessons, which is why learning how to practise intelligently matters so much. Practice is a continuous process of observation: you produce a result, listen, feel what happened, understand the relationship between action and outcome, make an adjustment and try again.
Every repetition contains information. The quality of that process determines what your practice is actually building.
This is also why we can spend a substantial part of a lesson examining something that appears microscopic. One movement, one relationship, one sensation or one moment in a phrase can open an entire system when it is understood properly. A very precise observation can reorganise the understanding of a much larger process and create a significant realisation about how the playing system works.
I find these moments fascinating because the student gains knowledge they can actually use independently.
ONLINE VIOLIN LESSONS HAVE PRACTICAL REALITIES
Online violin lessons have practical considerations. The student needs to become independent with the instrument, including learning to tune it, and on rare occasions the internet can create a technical interruption. Tuning is probably the most obvious example, but independence with the instrument is an important part of learning anyway. A violin is sensitive, its tuning changes, strings need attention, and eventually the player needs to know how to manage these things.
If somebody wants violin lessons partly because they want to leave the house, meet another person physically and make the lesson itself a social activity, face-to-face lessons provide that experience. These practical preferences are minor compared with the consequences of spending years learning without understanding the foundations that actually determine how you play.
My interest here is in the learning process itself: what information the student receives, what they understand, what they can reproduce and what happens when they are alone with the instrument again.
WHEN YOU ARE READY FOR DEEPER QUESTIONS
At the beginning, many people search for a violin teacher near me or a local violin teacher because these are the criteria they know how to evaluate. Deeper questions often appear later, when experience has accumulated and something still does not add up: Why is my violin playing still not working? Why, after years of lessons and practice, can I still not reliably produce the sound, intonation, rhythm or control I am trying to achieve?
There is an almost cruel irony in this. The knowledge required to ask better questions is often the knowledge the person was looking for in the first place. By the time those questions appear, years may already have been invested in practice, lessons and attempts to solve the problem from the wrong level.
This is one of the reasons I write about these things. If somebody encounters these questions earlier, their route through violin education can become more conscious from the beginning. And if you are already asking them, then we have something interesting to talk about.
THERE IS NO FREE TRIAL BUTTON AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE
These Writings have another purpose. After years of teaching and observing the same patterns from different sides, I feel a responsibility to document what I have learned about violin education and make that knowledge available. Some of what I observe has become a genuine professional pain, particularly when I see how much time people can spend without understanding what is actually important in learning an instrument as specific and demanding as the violin.
I want these observations to exist because they may help somebody notice earlier what deserves their attention, ask better questions and understand their own learning with greater depth.
That is enough reason for me to write them.
