Essential Elements for Strings - Book 2 with EEi: Violin
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Music
Essential Elements for Strings - Book 2 with EEi: Violin Details
(Essential Elements). Essential Elements for Strings offers beginning students sound pedagogy and engaging music, all carefully paced to successfully start young players on their musical journey. EE features both familiar songs and specially designed exercises, created and arranged for the classroom in a unison-learning environment, as well as instrument-specific exercises to focus each student on the unique characteristics of their own instrument. EE provides both teachers and students with a wealth of materials to develop total musicianship, even at the beginning stages. Essential Elements now includes Essential Elements Interactive (EEi), the ultimate online music education resource. EEi introduces the first-ever, easy set of technology tools for online teaching, learning, assessment, and communication... ideal for teaching today's beginning band and string students, both in the classroom and at home. For more information, visit Hal Leonard Online - Essential Elements Interactive. For a complete overview of Book 2, click here.
Reviews
At the time I write this review, I have been teaching myself violin for about 6 months. I have used the Essential Elements series and am thrilled with how easy to navigate and thorough they are. Book 1 teaches you the basics; Book 2 has been a good follow-up, but not a whole lot of new material is introduced. This book reviews the info learned in Book 1, teaches you how to play flat notes (whereas Book 1 covers the sharps), has some fun "performance" songs near the end, and very briefly covers sliding to another position and playing chords at the very end of the book.One thing that was frustrating to me- the CD that comes with the book does NOT have all of the tracks to play along with. Those CDs are one reason why I love this series- since I'm teaching myself, being able to play along with "backup" helps me make sure I'm playing the correct notes and corrects me if my timing is off. I was practicing one day, and all of a sudden my CD stopped because it ran out of tracks; I was only 1/3 to 1/2 way through the book!!! It was very frustrating that it is not mentioned in the description that you need to purchase the additional CD for all of the songs. The CD is found here: Essential Elements 2000 for Strings (Play-Along CD Set, Book 2)So, 4 stars for needing to purchase additional materials without much warning (I might let Amazon know though, so I can see if they'll add it to the description), and also because not a whole lot of new stuff is brought up in the book. However, it is still an excellent series, and I would not be where I am now in terms of learning the violin without Essential Elements 2000!
