Learning the Violin with Jessica Oberlin

At nearly every gig, someone asks Kailee Vallis's duo the same question: can you add a violinist? So Kailee — a professional musician who performs three to five nights a week on bass, guitar, and more — decided to stop hiring it out and learn violin herself. In this episode, Jessica and Kailee talk about what it takes to add a new instrument to a working career: why clients keep requesting violin, what carries over from years of playing bass (and what absolutely doesn't), how she's alre...

Can you learn the violin as a busy adult with a demanding career and no musical background? Harshad Ingle is proof that you can. Harshad is a research scientist and faculty member at the Washington University School of Medicine, studying ALS and Alzheimer's disease. Despite one of the busiest schedules imaginable, he is finally fulfilling a lifelong dream of learning violin — practicing just 15 minutes a day after work. In our conversation, Harshad and I talk about: Why he stopped waiting for...

When Mark Dandridge picked up the violin on August 23rd of last year, he was 59 years old, a retired Air Force veteran, a high school special education teacher in Arizona — and completely new to the instrument. He hadn't played anything since clarinet in the 1980s. He couldn't read music. It took him a full month just to learn how to hold the bow. Less than a year later, he's playing songs he loves. In this conversation, Mark shares what it was really like to start something completely ...

Rick is a retired engineer with a 48-year career, a former engineering teacher at a magnet high school, and a retired martial arts instructor who taught what we now call MMA before it had that name. He's also a lifelong musician — percussion starting at age 12, piano, guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, dobro, pedal steel. He spent his late teens and twenties playing professionally in road bands up and down the East Coast. Despite playing with all these other stringed instruments, he'd never touch...

For over a decade, Brenda — a high school science teacher from North Carolina — carried a quiet wish to learn the violin. She'd heard a violin solo in a song her daughter shared, fallen in love with the sound, and told herself, "If I don't have time on this earth, in the next life I will learn." This past January, she finally picked up the violin and bow. In this conversation, Brenda shares what it was actually like to start the violin as an adult beginner — from her first nervous unboxing (a...