Violin & Fiddle Lessons
A violin has no frets, no keys, no markings. Every note is found by the hand, guided by the ear. Most of what learning the instrument actually means is the slow joining of those two until they move as one thing.
Every pitch and every shade of tone is shaped by the player in the moment. Tuning, intonation, vibrato, articulation are all the same skill in different forms, and the work of learning is mostly the slow refinement of that skill.
Most of what makes a violin sound like itself happens in the meeting between the hand, the ear, and the bow.
Tone, dynamics, articulation, phrasing. Almost everything that makes a violin sound expressive comes from the right hand. Lessons spend real time on bow weight, bow speed, contact point, and the small adjustments that turn a note into a phrase. It is the quietest and most consequential side of playing.
Finding pitches is not a mechanical skill. It is the ear teaching the hand where to land. Lessons work on this slowly and patiently because there is no shortcut. Over time, what felt like guessing starts to feel like knowing.
Classical violin and fiddle music sit on the same foundation. Tone production, intonation, time. Once a player can hold a tone, find a pitch, and move a bow with intent, the music they choose to play is open. Lessons here can lean classical, lean fiddle, or move between them depending on what the student wants to learn next.
Violin tends to fit people who want to take the long view of an instrument. The early months ask for patience and attention from the body, and the rewards compound over time rather than landing all at once. Players who enjoy that kind of slow, layered progress tend to fall in love with it.
That might be a child starting young, an adult returning to an instrument they put down years ago, or someone picking up violin or fiddle for the first time because they finally have time. Some students come for classical training, some come for fiddle traditions, and some come without knowing yet. Lessons here meet each of them where they are.
Colten Bear teaches fiddle, violin, mandolin, banjo, and guitar at Resonate. He's a Métis fiddler who came up through Métis and bluegrass traditions, and studied with Daniel Gervais at Victoria School of the Arts. His fiddle work has won him both the Grand North American and Canadian Grand Masters Fiddle Championships, and put him on stage and on recordings alongside players like Natalie McMaster and Calvin Vollrath. He also writes and records with the Edmonton band Monks on Call.
Students who come in leaning fiddle find someone deep in the tradition. Students who come in for violin or starting from scratch find a teacher whose patience with intonation, bow control, and the slow work of listening comes from years of doing it himself.
Click the portrait to hear more about how Colten teaches.
Tell us a little about who lessons are for and what you have in mind.
You do not need everything figured out first.
If you'd like more before reaching out: common questions, the styles you can study, and what tends to develop in your first months and first year. Each section below is collapsed by default. Tap any heading to read more.
Real beginner questions. Tap any to read the full answer.
For a beginner, rent. Myhre’s Music in Edmonton has a strong rental program, and we’ve been sending families there for years. The rental is low-commitment, the violin comes properly set up (which matters enormously on violin), and if your child grows out of the size you can swap to the next one without buying again. For adults, rental is also often the right starting point: you’re not committing $500 or more on an instrument you may not love six months in.
Buying makes sense once you’re committed, or for students who have moved past the rental program’s quality ceiling. A solid beginner-to-intermediate violin in the $400 to $1500 range will serve most students for years. The very cheapest violins online or at big-box stores are worth avoiding; they often arrive with setup problems that make the instrument harder to play and harder to hear improvement on. Even a careful student will sound discouragingly bad on a poor instrument.
For Métis, Celtic, and folk fiddle traditions specifically, a basic fiddle from a rental program or a modestly-priced full-size fiddle is often the right starting point. Fiddlers tend to be less precious about gear than classical violinists.
Violins come in fractional sizes for children and full size (4/4) for older kids and adults. Rough guidelines:
Sizing is about arm length, not just age. The standard test is to extend the child’s left arm fully and rest the violin under the chin: their fingers should comfortably reach around the scroll (the curled end of the neck) without straining. A teacher can size a student on the spot before the first lesson, which is one of the reasons starting with rental is so practical.
For adults, full size (4/4) is standard. A few smaller-framed adults find 7/8 more comfortable, but 4/4 is the default and the size all standard violin repertoire is written for.
Same instrument, different traditions. A violin and a fiddle are physically identical: same body, same strings, same bow. What changes is the music, the technique, and often the player’s identity. “Violin” tends to imply classical, orchestral, or recital-hall contexts. “Fiddle” implies folk, Celtic, old-time, country, bluegrass, or Métis traditions: music for dancing, jamming, and community.
The technique differs in real ways. Fiddle styles use more rhythmic bowing, double-stops (playing two strings at once for harmony), drones, and ornaments specific to the tradition. Classical violin uses more vibrato, longer bow strokes, and a different relationship to dynamics. Many players move between both, and a teacher who plays in both traditions can show you where they overlap and where they differ.
For students in the Edmonton area, the Métis fiddle tradition is a particularly rich one to study: distinct rhythms, distinct ornaments, deep cultural roots, and an active community of players.
Violin is one of the earliest instruments students can begin, in part because of the Suzuki tradition that successfully starts kids as young as 3 or 4. Most kids start somewhere between ages 4 and 7. Earlier starts work when the child has the attention span for a short structured lesson and a parent who can help carry the practice between lessons.
The biggest physical consideration is hand and arm size. The smallest violins (1/16 and 1/10) make starting at age 3 or 4 physically possible, but it does require a teacher used to working with very young students.
For kids under 4 who love music but aren’t quite ready for a private violin lesson, our Tunes & Tots program (ages 2 to 3) and Junior Jammers (ages 4 to 5) build pitch, rhythm, and musical foundation in a group setting.
Adults often ask whether they’re starting too late. They aren’t. Adults bring more attention span and clearer goals than young kids, though the early period of violin is genuinely harder for adults than for kids in some ways (the body is less plastic). The trade-off is that adults can decide for themselves how much practice time to put in, which is the single biggest variable in how quickly anyone progresses.
In person is generally the better experience, regardless of age. Violin is particularly sensitive to small physical things: left-hand position, bow grip, the angle of the bow to the strings, the way the chin sits on the chinrest, posture through the shoulders. A teacher in the same room can see and correct these in real time, where a video call compresses the very visual cues that matter.
We keep online lessons available because they genuinely serve students who can’t make it in regularly. That includes students who live out of town and come in occasionally for in-person lessons, recitals, or recording sessions. It also covers the weeks when transportation, weather, or feeling a bit under the weather means an in-person make-up isn’t practical.
Plenty of students use a mix of both formats. The quality difference is real, and we noticed it directly during the COVID period when everything was online. That’s part of why we treat online as a complement to in person rather than a substitute.
The early weeks of violin involve some scratchy sounds. It’s the instrument’s honest learning curve, and there’s no avoiding it entirely. The good news: the scratchy phase is shorter than most beginners fear. Within the first few weeks of consistent practice, the bow starts to move cleanly across the strings more often than not. By the end of the first month, simple tunes can be played with mostly clean tone. By three months, the scratchy moments are usually the exception rather than the norm.
Sounding “good” in a fuller sense (meaning expressive, in tune, with controlled tone) takes longer. Practice frequency between lessons is the biggest factor. For students practicing a little most days, real musical sound emerges within the first year. Less consistent students take longer.
What helps the scratchy phase pass faster: a properly set-up instrument (one more reason to rent rather than buy the cheapest available), regular short practice sessions rather than rare long ones, and a teacher who can spot and correct the few specific things that cause the scratchy sound in the first place.
Violin and fiddle lessons here can move across a wide range of musical territory. Tap any style to read more.
The deepest tradition for violin. Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, the Romantic concertos, contemporary classical. Reading-based, technique-focused, vibrato-rich. Builds the foundation that supports every other style, and the path most violin students follow first if they’re also learning at school or in an orchestra program.
Celtic (Irish and Scottish), old-time American, bluegrass, Cape Breton, and the Métis fiddle tradition. Each has its own rhythms, ornaments, and feel. Edmonton has particularly strong Métis fiddle roots, and students drawn to that tradition can find both the music and the community here.
Country fiddle is its own discipline within the broader fiddle world. Honky-tonk, western swing, contemporary country fiddle, and the kind of melodic playing that supports vocal-led music. Often a natural extension for students who started in folk or bluegrass.
A small but committed tradition. Stéphane Grappelli, Regina Carter, Mark O’Connor. Swing feel, improvising over changes, comping behind soloists, and the kind of harmonic vocabulary jazz demands. Useful as a primary path for adventurous students, and as a layer that adds improvisational comfort to any other style.
Violin in pop, indie, and singer-songwriter contexts. String arrangements for original songs, recording session work, supporting other musicians. Often paired with classical study, since the techniques transfer.
For students who want to understand how music works beyond what their hands are doing: scales, key signatures, chord function, ear training, sight-reading. Especially valuable for classical and jazz study, and for students wanting to write or arrange music.
Rough averages. Pace varies based on age, practice consistency, and any prior musical experience.
How to hold the violin (under the chin, on the collarbone, supported by the shoulder), how to hold the bow (which feels strange at first for everyone), posture for both arms, finding open strings, and a first simple bowed exercise on one string. The visible progress varies; what’s actually beginning is the relationship between your body and a notoriously demanding instrument. The scratchy sounds in your first lesson are entirely normal.
With consistent practice, which is the single biggest variable in how quickly anyone progresses, most beginners are playing simple tunes on one or two strings by the end of the first month. Bow control starts to improve. The scratchy sound becomes less frequent. Hand position starts to feel less foreign. What’s developing in this period is left-hand finger placement, bow control, and the practice habit. The visible progress can feel slow even when the underlying foundation is building.
By around three months, most students have a small collection of simple tunes they can play through cleanly, growing comfort moving between open strings and fingered notes, and the beginnings of being able to hear when they’re in tune. The scratchy moments are usually the exception by now rather than the norm. Practice begins to feel less like effort. Weekly membership students reach their first complimentary recording studio session around this point, which can become a low-pressure way to capture something they’ve been working on.
The difference between students widens here. Those who practice regularly typically have a meaningful catalogue of pieces they enjoy playing, growing comfort across all four strings, the beginnings of vibrato (for classical students) or solid rhythmic bowing (for fiddle students), and more reliable intonation. Less consistent students may still be building basic comfort, and that’s fine too. Through the year, opportunities to perform in Resonate recitals and to use the included recording studio sessions come up several times for students who want to take them. The honest answer to “where will I be after a year” is that practice frequency between lessons matters more than almost any other factor.
Violin is a lifelong instrument. The teachers here have been playing for decades and still find new things in it. The first year is about getting the foundational pieces down: posture, bow control, basic intonation, comfort with the instrument under the chin. What comes after is leveling up what you can do with those foundations: the repertoire you can take on, the styles you can play, the bands or orchestras you can join, the recording sessions you can carry.
Some students build deep classical repertoire. Some shift into fiddle traditions and end up playing in folk bands or community jam sessions. Some pursue both. Some teach. Many do some combination of these over time.
Most students who stay with violin stay in lessons for years, because the instrument keeps opening up and so does the player. The road forks based on what lights you up, and a good teacher helps you notice which fork is calling.
