Teaching New Tricks: Adult Beginning String Players

            In my years of teaching I have had a wide range of students in terms of age and skill level. Beginning string players are some of my favorite students, no matter the age. While the majority of my students have been high school age or younger, I have had multiple adults come to me as beginning students. They tend to fall into one of three categories; complete beginners with little to no experience playing instruments, people who played the instrument when they were younger and want to get back into it, and people who play a different instrument who want to add to their skills. I have had multiple students of each type, and regardless of the category they fall into, I have always found the differences between them and my young beginners to be fascinating.

            First let’s talk about the difference between those three categories of adult beginners. The ones who play a different instrument and want to add string playing to their skills are the rarest. The couple examples I’ve had before were music teachers who were going to need to teach strings as part of a new assignment and wanted a crash course. As such a lot was easier to communicate with them than even “civilian” adults because we had a similar mindset/jargon as music teachers. I would say that the remainder of adults I’ve had have been about evenly split between those who have never played an instrument and those who are wanting to get back into it. I have a slight preference personally for the people who are brand new, because I can teach them the way I like from the beginning. People returning to it often have some knowledge of theory or technique, but there are often issues that need to be addressed, either because they were taught wrong initially, or more likely, they remember it wrong in the intervening years. You could say that they often know just enough to be dangerous. You do have to watch these students for a specific frustration; they might have been a very good player in their younger days, and now those skills might be basically all gone. They will have to be led through that. Their skills will often come back fairly quickly, and in my experience, more so if they do not dwell on how bad they might think they are now.

            Beyond those minute differences a lot about teaching adult beginners is the same. First there is the obvious fact that adults simply have more general knowledge than kids. They can often handle some of the more detailed components of things like music theory than younger kids. They can handle a lot more of the whys of what I’m teaching them. In fact that’s what several of these adult students have come to me for. Though it could be argued that advantage is outstripped by one simple fact; kids are like sponges. They tend to move through literature and techniques faster, simply because their brains are better suited to picking up new information. So you can throw adults more information at one time, but the kids will usually pick up the smaller bits faster.  Though motivation does play a key factor here. The adults are almost always more motivated; they want this and are paying their own money to do it, so they are open to the learning. With kids, that is not guaranteed. They might just be in lessons because their parents are making them, in which case, they won’t engage as easily so the spongey factor will be mitigated a bit. It does of course depend on the student, and with the proper approach it is possible to engage the most unmotivated of students.

            One other advantage the adults have is that they can start with a full sized instrument right away. There is a better chance that such an instrument will have a good quality sound on its own and not frustrate the student as much. It also means that they won’t have to adjust to a new instrument after a growth spurt. Those weeks after upgrading to a larger instrument can be frustrating for younger students as they have to adjust to their fingers having to stretch out a little more, the angle of their arm changing, and a host of other small factors that suddenly make the instrument feel wrong. The adults don’t have the same issue. Even if they get a different instrument the size will be the same (unless we’re talking about viola, then things might change, but that’s a different post).

            One of the most interesting differences I’ve noticed in teaching adult versus child beginners is their attitude about tone. Adults have a difficult time with the necessary scratches and squeaks that are made in the beginning stages of playing. Adults tend to have an idea of what good instrumental playing sounds like and have a difficult time comparing that sound in their head to the ones they are making. People who play other instruments are the worst. I experienced it myself when I began playing cello. I’d been playing violin for over a decade at that point so I went in with a certain arrogance, sure that my skills as a violinist would easily transfer and my tone would be great from the start. That was not the case at all, and I was incredibly frustrated by the dying cow-esque sounds I made in my first weeks with the cello. Most kids have no such idea about how they are supposed to sound. The multitude of scratches and scraping tones that are produced in the beginning don’t typically bother them because they don’t see it as “bad” sound. In fact some of them love making the sounds so much that it slips over into annoyance – for me not them. Some of them delight in the way the sounds like playing on the wrong side of the bridge or the crunch of all the possible bow weight on the right side can make me cringe. I do my best not to admonish them for it though, because I can tell they just enjoy playing the instrument. That can quickly be squashed by the attitudes of the adults around them listening to the squawks and scratches, but that is a separate point.

            One other advantage that kids have over the adults is that they are less set in their bodies and therefore tend to have fewer habits that can get in the way. Almost every adult student I’ve had has had some sort of issue with something they do habitually that hinders them in some way. Usually it is about tension buildup from how they store their stress. Yes the adults tend to have better overall coordination but these tension issues tend to level the playing field. This often comes down to what is referred to as the Body Map in a lot of movement methodologies like Alexander Technique. Adults will often have an idea of how their body moves, whether conscious or unconscious, that can negatively impact how they will play the instrument. Children have not set that map as solidly, and can therefore be guided to a much easier way of playing if taught well. It’s the same phenomenon all musicians become familiar with; it is much easier to learn something right than to try to fix it later.

            At the end of the day a beginning string player is a beginning string player and I love teaching them all. Being there for the beginning of a student’s career and watching them learn to do something that seemed difficult at first is maybe the thing I enjoy most about teaching. Honestly, if I only ever taught beginners for the rest of my life, passing them to someone else when they reached a certain level, I think I would be entirely satisfied.