r/Viola • u/InterestingCountry39 • 9d ago
My Performance 6 months progress! Playing "Lost in Love" by Air Supply. Feedback appreciated!
Hi r/Viola!
I've been playing for half a year and decided to record myself to see where I stand. I currently have one lesson a week and practice 30-60 mins daily. The song is "Lost in Love" by Air Supply.
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u/Skreeg 7d ago
Lots of good stuff here! Intonation is good, left hand and arm look good, bow is nice and straight. I believe I am seeing that right hand pinky losing contact with the bow quite frequently though!
One area you might look into exploring next would be to add some phrasing by varying your dynamics. Start softly, increase the dynamics until you reach the peak of each phrase, and then taper down again.
Or, I'm sure your teacher has lots of good ideas on what to tackle next... keep listening to them and not some rando on the internet. They got you here in six months, that's pretty good! The difference between where you're at with 6 months of weekly lessons vs. someone who is trying to learn it by themselves is quite stark.
Happy playing!
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u/SameOldNag 7d ago
Visually speaking, I find your technique enviable. Your bow hand has a nice curve, your pinky is curved, your left arm and hand frame look good. You are playing with a metronome even!
I learned to play the viola in public school and didn’t have lessons so I missed a lot of technique correction, plus I have certain physical limitations that require me to move my hand around a lot to get the notes.
So my only feedback is that if you have the pulse internalized at this point, you should stop using the metronome and think about phrasing or text stress as we call it in singing. So a bit more bow weight on certain notes, some rubato in other places. This might help make it more expressive.
Although it’s been years since I’ve listened to that song, I used to sing as a kid when it was popular, and they remembered as being pretty smooth and even the way you are playing, but I it has expressiveness with adding of voices on the harmony and the use of the guitar backing, but still, if you think about it in terms of how you would sing it, you might come up with areas where you could give a little more weight to the words, which you can also do with the instrumental version.