Thanks so much for commenting! If you do publish your melodies please let me know. I’m always looking for new material. My husband (a composer) and I are also working on a book similar in nature. I have found that most method books fall short not only in material for students to use the 4th finger right from the start, but in teaching all the strings as well as different meters, keys and styles. It sounds as though you have also found this to be the case. I try to use the books that I like and supplement with my own material as necessary. I’ll keep your email address and let you know when our book is completed and maybe it can be a good resource for you and your students. :)

Emily

Thank you for relaying your very interesting personal experience! I am a big proponent of natural medicine and healing with vitamins and supplements. As your experienced confirms, our bodies are very adept at healing themselves when they are given the correct nutrients. It also highlights another important aspect of “tone deafness”, which is the physical/medical side. While I think in general most “tone deafness” can be overcome with correct training I think it’s important to consider the physical side of it as well, especially in light of the fact that I know it is common for Americans to be deficient in B12. This is a very interesting component in our ability to distinguish pitch. I would be interested to look into it more. Thanks for reading and sharing!

Emily

In the range of my instrument (the violin), I could distinguish pitch well enough, but as I discovered a couple of years ago, I had mostly been relying on beat frequencies for tuning (actually, all musicians rely heavily on beat frequencies, but I was using them almost exclusively).

I did not discover the basic problem until I started taking piano lessons. At that time, I found that I could not reliably distinguish pitch differences in the lower two octaves of the piano.

It’s a long story, but I did accidentally find something that helped significantly: sublingual megadose B12. Within a couple of weeks of taking a daily 3500 microgram dose of B12, I was amazed to find that I could actually hear the pitches in the lower octaves on the keyboard — not really well at first, but it is still getting better.

I have also noticed that I can hear pitches more accurately even the range of the violin, especially on the high end.

I wrote a couple of articles on that experience, one on my NEquals1Health.com blog, and the other on my Celtic-Fiddler.com/fiddler blog.

I’m not claiming that B12 will cure tone deafness, but it is certainly something to try — B12 is cheap, and completely non-toxic even in huge doses.

Thanks for commenting! Mazas and Pleyel are good duet books for intermediate students. For easier duets I use the Duets for Strings books by Samuel Applebaum. Hope that helps!

Emily

Sharon Theroux