The Four Pillars

 What does it take to grow a student from beginner to virtuoso? Excellent teaching is only a part of it. There are 3 other pillars that provide the proper support for a student to grown into mastery. The four pillars of Pedagogy, Practice, Persistence, and Performance make the foundational framework on which Soundpillar Academy students can stand and flourish.

Master the Stack

If you break down violin mastery into its component parts, you are left with a set of 9 to 10 basic skills that must be mastered in an order dictated by dependencies, building from foundational skills, up to the more expressional skills. We call it the Musical Aspect Stack, or the MASTA.

Grow your Mastery

Mastery as in Musical Aspect Tree or MAsTree, for short. It takes all the elements from the Musical Aspect Stack and logically orders them in an array of multi-branch progress paths for each aspect, each node represented by a skills test. Yes, gamers – it’s a tech tree for violin mastery.

PEARLS of Wisdom

In the past, a violin student would receive his or her weekly assignments in a simple notebook. Given the limited time during a lesson, the teacher would only jot down a few simple instructions and that would be the end of it. At Soundpillar Academy, we understand the importance of simplicity so the student can focus without being overwhelmed.

But we also understand the importance of equipping the student for his or her practice time at home, since that is where the majority of progress is made. Therefore, we provide our private lesson students with PEARLS after each session – that is: Practice Strategy, Evaluation, Assignment, Recordings, Lesson Log, and Schedule.

Keep Up The Pace

What does an artist share with an athlete? At its most basic physiology, all talent and all ability come down to the development of muscle, muscle memory, and myelin. The myelin sheath of an expert artist or athlete has been built up around the specific nerves that enable that artist or athlete to do things that others can only dream of. There’s so much more to it than that and there have been a lot of books recently that cover this.

But for our purposes, we realize that just as athletes condition their bodies to go faster, higher, and stronger (the Olympic motto in Latin – citius, altius, fortius), the violinist, too, must seek to go faster, higher, and stronger in their own way as well – through speed (tempo), precision (accuracy in intonation, rhythm, bowing), and power (expression, conveying a story or pure emotion). We even have our own Soundpillar motto in Italian – Precisamente, Accelerando, Espressivo (PAcE).