Habits of a Successful String Musician, Viola

Habits of a Successful String Musician is a terrific resource for advanced middle school and high school string players that prepares students for playing high-level repertoire. The book consists of more than 400 sequenced exercises that will help build students' musical enthusiasm and skills and introduce students to some of the world's most fantastic music. The books include warm-ups, chorales, sight-reading etudes, rhythm vocabulary exercises, tuning canons, and sight-reading exercises.

Other highlights of this series:

• Presents a sequential and comprehensive method for developing skills that lead to the mastery of reading rhythms and to musical sight-reading.
• Creates a method for teaching scales, arpeggios and thirds that simultaneously accommodates students of different ability levels.
• Organizes tone, rhythm, and articulation patterns into a flexible and sequential series.
• Creates finger pattern and velocity studies that address the most common problems encountered by intermediate orchestra students.
• Provides beginning through advanced shifting exercises for students of every level.
• Creates exercises for learning alternate clefs and higher positions.
• Provides chorales for the development of intonation, tone quality, blend, and musicianship.
• Presents rhythm charts in a new format that allows transfer from timing and rhythm to pitches in a musical context.
• Provides audition sight-reading in a classroom “full ensemble” format that is well planned in scope and sequence. There are over 130 sight-reading examples in this book.
• Promotes the idea that students should cross the threshold from the “technical components of playing” to music making.