High Strung
Violins & Guitars
1116 Broad Street
Durham NC 27705
(919) 286-3801
Rental Program
For Parents
My Child Wants to Play Violin - What am I in for?
- Learning these bowed instruments is really, really hard. But with encouragement from you, your child can do it.
- It's going to sound really bad, at first. Avoid laughing or screaming. From personal experience, I can tell you that sarcastic comments from parents are not inspirational.
- You will have to attend a few concerts a year, the ones your child plays in, and concerts by professional string players. Listening to live music performance provides inspiration and role models for your student, and will strengthen their bond to playing the instrument.
- Listen to them practice, and occasionally ask them to play for you, even if they always act embarrassed. (But don't hover at practice time or get over-bearing. Students should be playing for the love of music or the challenge of mastery, not to avoid being yelled at.)
- Get a private teacher if you can at all afford it. The public school teachers can only provide but so much individual instruction in a class of ten, twenty or thirty students. Private lessons will propel your student towards more competent playing (and more enjoyable listening for you!) Your school teacher will thank you for it.
- Improve the instrument as your child improves. As your child gets better, their instrument needs to get better. If your instrument is really awful, your child will probably be roughly the same.
About Brand Names and Violins
Parents call us all the time and ask "Do you carry X-Brand?" or "My child's teacher says I should get a Z-Brand Violin." If the violin sounds great and plays well, I couldn't care less about the name on the inside. Sometimes they are famous brands, and sometimes they are from such small shops that there's no way they would be well-known names.
Violins are wooden instruments, and each one, even within the same make and model, will vary in terms of its tone and workmanship. Buying a violin isn't like buying an iPod or Shampoo; it's more like buying a horse or a house. An iPod can be mass produced with consistent, nearly identical results, which makes it an ideal commodity to market on the internet. Horses, houses, and violins all have characteristics that can be generalized, but each individual one may be very different from the next.
We work with companies that provide good service and consistently good instruments. But we don't hesitate to send instruments back if they don't meet our standards for what we want in an instrument at a particular price level.
- Christine, Co-owner
High Strung
Parents call us all the time and ask "Do you carry X-Brand?" or "My child's teacher says I should get a Z-Brand Violin." If the violin sounds great and plays well, I couldn't care less about the name on the inside. Sometimes they are famous brands, and sometimes they are from such small shops that there's no way they would be well-known names.
Violins are wooden instruments, and each one, even within the same make and model, will vary in terms of its tone and workmanship. Buying a violin isn't like buying an iPod or Shampoo; it's more like buying a horse or a house. An iPod can be mass produced with consistent, nearly identical results, which makes it an ideal commodity to market on the internet. Horses, houses, and violins all have characteristics that can be generalized, but each individual one may be very different from the next.
We work with companies that provide good service and consistently good instruments. But we don't hesitate to send instruments back if they don't meet our standards for what we want in an instrument at a particular price level.
- Christine, Co-owner
High Strung