What are some good Martial Arts training techniques?

Violins: What 3-5 techniques should every beginner player master to the point of excellence? And following that up, is there one favorite exercise you would recommend to ingrain that technique into your motor memory?

• I don't know of any examples from violin training, but I've trained in martial arts for over ten years. One example from there is the mastery of the front knee kick. A person who is extremely good at that, will have learned to throw the hip forward, to extend the torso up-and-forward while rooting the base leg, and so on. If you haven't mastered the front knee kick (and its core elements), then it is difficult to be great at roundhouse kicks, front kicks, and a bunch of others. Likewise, are there any such core techniques for the violin? If you've been training for years on the violin, maybe you can help me create a list of 10 techniques that every beginner needs to be highly proficient at? I am a newbie to the instrument, so any ideas/advice/perspectives you have will be appreciated (even if it is something that helps clarify my question). Looking forward to your replies. Thanks so much!

• Answer:

  I'm only an amateur violin player (played through high school and a little in college), but I thought I'd offer a few important things I struggled with in my early years. I suspect others might have better suggestions than me on how to best practice these skills. 1. Listening - Violin was the first instrument I played, and my relative pitch wasn't well developed. Unlike instruments like the piano or the guitar, you don't have "quantized" notes where you either hit it or you don't - rather there are infinite wrong notes between right ones. It took a lot of time for me to quickly discern when I was playing wrong notes, especially in higher registers. To get better at this, I think it would help to voraciously listen to professional recordings of whatever you're playing, and make sure you're using your ear as much as possible - e.g. tune A string first, then tune others off of this in chords, or match pitches between octaves esp. for higher notes (play lower C, then play higher C if you're not sure what the higher C should sound like). 2. Hand positioning - There are so many bad habits for both hands - e.g. "pizza wrist" where you're bending your left wrist upwards to support the instrument (this interferes with playing notes on the top) or I had a bad habit of gripping my bow with my pinky finger straight (this eventually hurt!). I don't have a great suggestion for the left hand other than make sure you have a teacher that will show you the proper positioning and call you out when you're doing it wrong. For bowing, pick up other rod-like objects to practice the position (sometimes depending on the weight of the bow you might be tempted to hold it incorrectly, especially if it happens to be weighted more towards the top) 3. Bowing - The act of bowing was also a problem for me, and many violin learners tend to draw the bow arm too far towards the body, causing the bow to run across the strings diagonally. This affects your tone quality and also causes people to lose control of the bow and run into those awful squeaky sounds from the strings below the bridge. Just spend a lot of time looking at your bow as you're playing and making sure the bow is perpendicular to the strings for every string. Later, also practice bouncing the bow on each string and moving from one string to another. 4. Shifting - Not knowing how to shift well into 3rd and 5th position will seriously inhibit a violinist. Learn the tricks for being able to move firmly into these positions; third position should have heel of hand touching the right side of the violin, fifth position should have the area between thumb and index finger cupping the bottom of the violin's fingerboard. Practice full or truncated scales to get used to shifting on each string, and become familiar with your own "landmarks" that tell you when you've shifted properly (meaning either visual signs looking at your hand relative to parts of the instrument, or sensations of where your hand is contacting the instrument). Good luck! I hope you enjoy learning!