This Violinist Found the Secret to a Beautiful Sound — and It Wasn’t More Time or Effort (Case Study)
“I tried recording myself playing violin last week and I was mortified! It did not sound good. How do I make a more beautiful sound? Is it just a matter of time and practice? Will I be able to play like the violinists I admire some day?” my student, whom I’ll call A, asked me in our lesson this week.
A is an adult violin enthusiast who’s been playing for about a year. He’s inspired by the professional fiddlers he enjoys and loves jamming with his family, but also struggles with consistently creating a beautiful sound, and playing violin often feels more like struggle than flow. 😣
That day in our lesson, I could hear the question behind his question, which is a universal struggle among musicians: “How do I recreate the sound that I feel I have inside me? How do I create something truly beautiful?” 😍
Here, I reflected on what I had seen and heard in A’s playing over the past year. Often, I saw him tensing up as he played, causing his bow to skip over the strings, his sound to become thin and scratchy, and his expression to become somewhat mechanical.
I knew immediately jumping into providing the “right” techniques wouldn’t work for A that day. I have seen countless times how musicians with the right techniques use them in the wrong ways (i.e. “trying harder”), and thus fail to find the joy, flow, comfort, and beauty they desire. 😒
What A needed instead was to understand the true source of beauty because only that would help him use the right techniques in the right ways to make a truly beautiful sound.
So, I inquired, “What is beauty? Beauty speaks to a deeper order, something that organizes what can be seen or heard on the surface into an integrated whole. The deeper the order, the more beautiful something is. ✨
“Here’s the issue with your playing: you’re trying to *make* beauty happen, but beauty cannot be manufactured through effort or willpower. These only lead to tension and a mechanical sound.
“Instead, you need to realize that, while it’s true that you enhance your ability to play beautifully through time and practice, it’s equally true that you already have the beauty you seek inside you, whether or not you believe it’s there.
“Your task, then, is not so much to try harder to recreate the beauty you feel inside you, but to learn how to get out of the way. You can do this through two methods:
🧘♀️ Effortlessness skills like “The Magic Pause,” which help you release the tension in your body and open a channel to the source of beauty inside you: your creative aliveness, and
🤎 My methods for “playing from the heart,” which helps center your attention on the creative aliveness inside you so you can transform what might otherwise be a sequence of sounds into real, living music.”
He thought about this for a moment and then replied with pure gold: “So, beauty has an element of mystery to it, and I have to let that mystery be there while I play?”
“That’s exactly it,” I replied. “And by relinquishing trying hard to get it right, you open the door to that mystery and thus allow your creative aliveness to pour out through your sound.”
I then asked him to play one of his pieces, and we explored how he could play it more effortlessly and from the heart. (For more on the exact methods we used, check out “The Magic Pause” and “Playing from the Heart” in my book “Soulforce.”)
The result for A? Here are his own words:
🤩 “Wow! I really enjoyed that. It feels so much easier to play and my sound was much more open and rich. For the first time, my music felt truly alive. I’m excited to try this out at home!”
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So, here’s the moral of the story.
You want to let your music pour out of you as you play and to create something truly beautiful (whatever beauty means to you).
This possibility is closer than you think. 🌠
If you’re not feeling it as consistently as you’d like, it could be that you’re trying too hard and getting in your own way.
The solution is not to try harder and practice more, but rather to learn some basic effortlessness skills so the creative aliveness you know is inside you can pour out more effectively and fully. 😎
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I’m sure you’ve had many experiences of your creative aliveness pouring out of you. Share one in the comments below!
