Best violin books for beginners

Two books dominate beginner violin, they are both excellent, and they disagree fundamentally about how a child should start. One teaches notation from page one. The other deliberately refuses to for the first few years. Picking between them is not a quality judgment; it is a judgment about the teacher you have and the route the child is going to take.

Every pick below states its Starter Path band, and we have not worked through any of them cover to cover — the method is on how we pick. Authors, page counts and contents come from the publishers’ own catalog entries, cited at the bottom.

Two methods, two theories of how children learn

Essential Elements for Strings is the American school standard, written by Robert Gillespie, Pamela Tellejohn Hayes and Michael Allen, 48 pages. It is a notation-first classroom method: the student reads from the beginning, the violin book lines up with the viola, cello and bass books so a whole orchestra can work through it together, and the online EE Interactive content provides accompaniment to play against.

Suzuki Violin School is the opposite approach. Shinichi Suzuki’s mother-tongue principle observes that children speak fluently years before they read, and argues music should work the same way. The student listens to the recording daily, learns by imitation, and reading is introduced much later. Volume 1 is 48 pages and the current International Edition ships with a recording performed by Hilary Hahn, accompanied by Natalie Zhu.

Both work. They produce different players at the two-year mark: the Suzuki student usually sounds better and the Essential Elements student can usually read. Which matters more depends entirely on where the child is heading.

The gap Suzuki leaves, and the book that fills it

This is the single most useful thing to know before committing to the Suzuki route. The reading gap is not a rumour and it is not a criticism of the method — it is a designed consequence of it, and it has a standard fix.

Joanne Martin’s I Can Read Music, Volume 1#ad exists for exactly this. Alfred describes it as a first note-reading book for string students who learned to play using an aural approach such as the Suzuki method, or for traditionally taught students who need extra reading practice.

Its method is the clever part. Rhythm and pitch are taught separately, so the student is only ever decoding one new thing at a time, and the progression is small enough that Alfred explicitly describes it as usable daily at home by quite young children and their parents. It is published for viola and cello too, which matters in a family with more than one string player.

Start it early. A child who has been playing by ear for three years has a much harder time accepting a reading book than one who has been doing a page a week since the beginning.

What a violin book cannot do

Worth saying plainly, because it changes what you should spend money on. Violin is the instrument on this site where self-teaching from a book works least well, and there are two specific reasons.

There are no frets. Every note is produced by placing a finger on an unmarked string, and correct placement is a matter of a millimeter or two. A beginner cannot hear their own intonation reliably, because the ear that judges it is the same ear being trained. A teacher hears it instantly.

The bow arm fails invisibly. A locked wrist, a collapsed thumb or a bow drifting toward the fingerboard all produce a scratchy sound, and a beginner reading a book has no way to connect the sound to the cause. These habits also become physically entrenched quickly and are genuinely unpleasant to undo.

None of which means do not buy a book. It means the book is the cheap part of a violin education, and the honest allocation of a budget puts a teacher first. Our page on whether violin is hard to learn is blunter about this than most, and how to hold a violin and bow covers what a book will not show you.

What we did not list, and why

All For Strings is the other common American school method and a perfectly good book. It is not listed because it is a direct substitute for Essential Elements rather than a different kind of thing, and the deciding factor between them is which one the program uses — a decision no roundup can make for you.

Wohlfahrt and the classic etude books are the right next step after a first method and are not beginner books. They assume a left hand that already places reliably and a bow arm that already draws straight.

Violin For Dummies and similar broad guides were left off for the reason above: the parts of violin a prose book can teach are the parts that matter least, and the parts that matter most cannot be taught in prose at all.

Suzuki Volume 1 without the CD is sold separately and cheaper, and we would avoid it. In the Suzuki method the recording is not supplementary material; daily listening is the mechanism by which the method works. Buying the book alone is buying half the product.

What to buy alongside the book

A violin that fits, before anything else. Violin is the one family where size is set by arm length rather than age, and a violin one size too large cannot be played correctly by anybody — our violin sizing guide has the measurement to take first.

Then a shoulder rest and a tuner, which almost never come in the outfit and both of which are covered on violin accessories you actually need.

Theory can wait, and when it stops waiting it is not violin-specific. Intervals, keys and rhythm notation are the same subject on every instrument, and a general workbook is cheaper and better organized than anything string-specific — our music theory books roundup covers that.