What Should I Practice on the Violin?
Last reviewed: August 2026
Every honest thing you could practise is doing one of three jobs. Name them, and what to practise stops being a guess.
The Difficulty Is Not Finding Something to Work On
You sit down with thirty minutes. The scales want attention, and so does the new piece you are meant to be learning; yesterday's passage still feels unreliable, there is a shift you keep meaning to clean up, and you could always run the whole thing through or give the time to tone. Thirty minutes is enough to do one of those things properly, and nowhere near enough to do all of them. That is where practice turns strangely hard, because the difficulty is no longer finding something to work on. You have too much. The question left is which of it deserves the time you have tonight.
For an adult fitting the violin around work and a life, this is the quiet difficulty under the whole thing. The time is short, and everything in the case seems to have a claim on it. The worry underneath is simpler than laziness: the sense that the half hour went somewhere reasonable and still not where it would have counted most.
Every Practice Session Has One of Three Jobs
The choice feels hard because all those competing things look equal lined up in your head, when each is doing one of three different jobs. Protect the past, change the present, prepare the future. Sort tonight's options into those three and the open field of guilt becomes a question you can answer. What am I protecting? What am I changing? What am I making possible?
Protect
Keep what already works. Test it cold, and if it holds, leave it alone.
Change
The one problem that, once it improves, makes the most of the rest easier.
The best minutesPrepare
Work whose payoff belongs to a later session. Remove tomorrow's friction now.
Most of a session belongs to one change. Protection keeps the edges. Preparation earns the end.
Protect: Test Whether It Is Still Yours
Protection is the quiet job of checking that a skill you believe you own still survives on its own, without being coaxed back into existence first.
So it has a test, and it runs in under a minute. Take one thing you think you already have, a scale that settled, a shift that stopped being a gamble. Do not warm it up. Play it once, cold, at a real tempo, and listen. If the intonation, the rhythm and the sound all held, it is still yours. If it did not, it has quietly stopped being protection and become a change.
A good teacher should be willing to tell you to leave something alone. If a skill survives a cold check, it does not need another twenty comfortable minutes only because it happens to be on your list. Protection earns a few minutes at the edges of a session, and the middle belongs to something else.
Change: Spend the Best Minutes on the Biggest Problem
Change is where progress lives, and the job most sessions quietly skip. To change something is to give one problem the best, freshest minutes of the evening. The whole art is in the choosing, because only some of what is wrong deserves those minutes.
You may be here if: you sit down with four things you could work on and give the evening to whichever one your hands reached for first.
When somebody plays for me, I listen past everything that is wrong for the one thing that, once it changes, sorts out three others on its own. Say a passage has unreliable intonation, a crowded bow, and a shift that arrives late. All three are real, and three separate exercises would chase the symptoms while the cause carried on. I listen for which one is producing the others: if the shift arrives late because the hand prepares too late, the intonation it throws off will keep coming back however long you spend correcting it. The work is to find the change that makes the rest easier, and to leave the others alone until it does.
You can run a rougher version yourself. Ask, of everything bothering you: if I could fix only one thing this week, which change would make the largest number of other passages easier? Then test each: does it recur across more than one piece, does fixing it help other things or only itself, and can it be changed at all in the time you have? When one problem wins on all three, you have your change for the week. If you cannot tell which is the real one, you have crossed from choosing into diagnosing, and that is a separate question with its own method.
Once you have chosen, how you work it matters more than how long you spend. Make each attempt answer a question, and the count of repetitions stops mattering.
- Shrink the passage until it is small enough to tell whether one attempt changed anything. Often a bar or two is enough.
- Before you play, decide what a better result should sound or feel like, so there is something to judge against.
- Make one deliberate attempt, then stop and ask whether the result changed. If it did not, change the approach rather than repeating the same attempt harder.
- When the improvement holds, widen the passage out again and return it to the music.
There is always more worth fixing than a session can hold, and the passage that feels worst, or hardest, or most irritating volunteers first every time. Urgency is a poor guide to importance, and giving in to it is how the evening quietly disappears.
Choose the one thing that, once it changes, takes the most of your playing with it.
Prepare: Make Tomorrow's Practice Easier
Preparation is the job adults skip most, because it shows no result the same evening. Its point is elsewhere: it is practice whose payoff belongs to a later session, removing the friction that would otherwise eat the start of next week.
It has a few shapes. The commonest is getting acquainted: reading a new piece once and marking where the shifts and awkward crossings come, so tomorrow's first attempt starts from something you have already seen. Another is preparing the ingredient. When next week's passage needs a movement you cannot yet do, a run of shifts into third position, a crossing that keeps catching, you isolate that one movement tonight instead of failing at it inside the repertoire. And sometimes the most useful preparation is choosing not to work on a piece at all yet. When every page hands you a different problem, you cannot tell which one you are learning; a piece where the difficulty is narrower, one useful shift, one bowing question, one kind of phrasing, lets you learn the thing cleanly and carry it somewhere harder later. The ambition is the same; what changes is where the learning happens.
How to Decide What to Practise Tonight
Put the three jobs together and the decision runs itself, sized to the clock. The clock sets how many of the three fit in one sitting, and a short clock means fewer of them, worked with the same care. Twenty minutes is honest room for one change; thirty holds a change and a short cold check; three quarters of an hour lets preparation earn its place at the end. The first thing I ask a student to do is settle how much time they honestly have that day, because that number decides how many of the three jobs will fit.
The shape of a good thirty minutes
A real thirty minutes
You arrive with four things: a scale that has been reliable, a shift that is late in two pieces, a new movement you need to begin, and a string crossing that keeps catching in a passage you study next week. You cold-test the scale; it holds, so it stays in protection. The shift is late in two pieces and unsettles everything around it, so it is the change, and takes the first twenty minutes while you are fresh. With the last few, you prepare: you read the new movement once and mark where its shifts and crossings are coming. Nothing on the list is finished, and tomorrow starts further along than today did.
What a Violin Teacher Adds
That last decision, which of the four gets the evening, is the one hardest to make alone. In a first lesson you might arrive with a scale that feels unreliable, two passages you have been avoiding, and a new piece that seems to need everything at once. I listen for a minute, tell you what is costing you most, and we spend the lesson on that one thing until it moves. Above all I name the change you are too close to your own playing to see, the one that carries the most of it with it.
The hard part of practising alone is holding all of that in view at once and choosing well, week after week, when every piece of it is asking for attention. You leave with the three jobs sorted and a change worth the month, and over weeks it stops being something handed to you and becomes the way you decide for yourself.
You are allowed to leave a session having moved one thing and let the rest wait. The sessions that add up are the ones that knew, each evening, which of the three jobs they were for.
One lesson to find out what is worth your practice time.
You bring the music you are working on. I listen, sort what you are carrying into what to keep, what to change and what to prepare, and show you where your practice will have the greatest effect. You leave with a clear next step and a way of deciding for yourself.
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How do I know what to practise on the violin?
Sort what you could do into three jobs and the answer follows. Most of the session belongs to one change, the single problem that, once it improves, makes the largest number of other passages easier. A little belongs to protection: take one thing you think you own, play it once cold without warming it up, and leave it alone if it holds. Whatever time is left goes to preparation, the groundwork for next week. If you cannot tell which of several problems is the one worth changing, that has become a question of diagnosis, and there is a separate way to work through it.
What should I practise first on the violin?
Start with the change, while your attention is freshest. It is the problem with the largest downstream effect, the one that recurs across pieces and that other things are built on, so improving it first makes the rest of the session easier rather than harder. Protection and preparation belong to the middle and the edges of a session; the opening minutes go to the change. Give the best of your concentration to the one thing that carries the most.
What should I practise if I only have 20 or 30 minutes?
Let the clock decide how many of the three jobs fit; a shorter clock means fewer of them. In twenty minutes there is honest room for one change and nothing else, so choose the single most limiting thing and give it the whole slot. Thirty holds that change plus a couple of minutes to cold-test something you already own and do not want to lose. On a short clock, aim for one thing moved well, and let the tour of everything wait.
Do I need a teacher to know what to practise?
A good deal of this you can do alone with the three jobs and a simple rule, and most weeks you should. Where a teacher earns their place is in naming the change you are too close to see, and in sorting the pile when you cannot tell which problem is limiting the others. You do not need to arrive with the answer. Bringing everything you could work on, and the uncertainty about which deserves the evening, is the reason to come.
Do I need to prepare anything for a first lesson?
No. Bring the violin and whatever you are working on now, in whatever state it is in. Sorting it into what to keep, what to change and what to prepare is the work of the lesson, so arriving unsure is the normal starting place. There is nothing to rehearse and nothing to settle beforehand.
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