A question for those of you who are actually out playing jazz gigs. What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you were starting out that you only really learned from playing live? Maybe it’s something about playing with a band, something you wish you had started practising earlier, dealing with nerves, playing tunes you don’t know or just anything at all about learning jazz violin. Whatever it is, drop it in the comments. here’s mine learning to improvise whilst looking at a chord chart is a different skill to learning to follow or be led along by the changes in your head and ear. Start practising this from day one and stop yourself from always looking at changes when you practise.

I've been in the habit of buying MP3 downloads which I can then play on my phone with Audipo, which is a good slower downer and looper tool I found for android, but this only works if I can find an MP3 of the thing I want to transcribe (and tbh it gets expensive buying tracks and albums - although I'm all for paying money to living artists a lot of the guys I'm buying music from are dead so maybe I don't need to feel bad about using a free option if I can find one?!) What do people use? YouTube has a play speed option for emergencies but I can't loop stuff or bookmark it easily and have to listen to adds more often than not... Do people create mp3s from YouTube? Is there a less faffy option I just haven't discovered yet? The Amazing Slower Downer used to work with Spotify playlists but no longer as far as I know (and screw Spotify anyway)...

For me it’s anything based on those Coltrane changes like countdown or Giant Steps. I find I can play over it if I’m reading it but I forget the changes really easily. If I play it with anyone in a gig or jam setting, it always ends up a car crash on my part How about you?

A question for you today. As jazz violinists, when you practice, do you mainly work on “how” you execute your notes or “what” notes you play?

I decided to go back to some basics this week. I have been practising lick 1g, chapter one in Matts book, as a warm up exercise in12 keys. In then decided that I needed to apply it to a tune, with my own variations arising out of it. So here it is on Daphne!