Beginning violin and fiddle Video Lesson: How to play the Canon by Pachelbel

Hi, I'm Lora Staples with Red Desert Violin and I'm here today for virtual sheet music, and I want to talk to you about the 'Pachelbel Canon,' the most beloved tune for weddings and for weddings! It's a very popular wedding piece, but, you know, I've probably played it 800 times, maybe 1000, I'm still not tired of it. I love this piece! But besides being a beautiful piece, it has a lot of benefits to learning it. So, if you have not yet played it 800 times, I wanna give you a few ideas of how you can exploit this tune to help your violin playing.

First and foremost, this is a great piece to improve your reading. Because most of us, kind of, have the melody in our ears and so your ear can help guide your sight-reading. That's number one, but number two it uses so many different note values. It's got quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes and rests, and is just very valuable for learning how to do better at reading rhythms.

So, first thing I would recommend to you, if you want to improve your sight-reading and your understanding of rhythms, I would print this out and I would just do some homework. With a pencil, I would draw a line down your music for every eighth note. What this forces you to do is something called 'subdivision'. Normally, we just count quarter notes as our beat. You can pretty much count on that, but the 'Canon' is one piece that's an exception. It is quite slow and if we counted the quarter note as our beat, it would go one, two, three, and that's just so slow it's not even really a beat. So, we subdivide to the next smaller level and that's eighth notes. So, the beginning kind of feels like half notes!

Two, one, two, one, two, one. See how you kind of feel two beats in each of those? Those are just quarter notes. So, really, we naturally want to feel the eighth note as a beat. So, take your sheet music and write what's called 'hash marks,' or just little vertical lines to help you count the eighth notes. This is just simple mathematics. So, in the beginning when you have quarter notes, each one of those quarter notes is gonna have two lines by it. And then, when you get to bar seven, for instance, well that's easy, because there're eighth notes! So, each eighth note would have a line through it. When you get to bar 11, then every other sixteenth note is gonna have a line through it, right? Because two sixteenth notes fit inside of one eighth note.

All right, so, I hope you understand what I'm describing. This is a powerful lesson. I remember when someone first suggested that I do this, my rhythm was outstanding after I did this! I did it on the unaccompanied Bach 'G minor Adagio' violin piece and that's full of . . . even a hundred and twenty-eighth notes. So, that was a real exercise in rhythm and if you can find that piece, that would be an advanced challenge for you. Start with the 'Canon,' later you've got, like in bar 19, you've got a sixteenth note followed by two thirty second notes. You've got to know how these notes add up rhythmically.

So, one eighth note is worth two sixteenth notes, so you see your first sixteenth note is right there at the beginning of the bar. Where's the other sixteenth note? We need one more sixteenth note. The two thirty second notes put together, that's your other sixteenth note. Okay, so the first sixteenth note plus the two thirty second notes, those three notes combined give you your eighth note. Okay, so that would get one vertical mark. All right, I challenge you to do this. It will completely strengthen your understanding of rhythm and subdivision.

All right, the second major value of the 'Pachelbel Canon' is it gives you some simple opportunities to go into third position. There are some places where you have to go into third position. In bar 15, that is where I would recommend that you shift. Don't wait till you have to get up to third position, be proactive! So, the downbeat of 15. . . And that's just a shift you have to practice. From the second finger, it's an octave, F-sharp to F-sharp. And then I shift back down on the C-sharp in bar 17. That's just me, but that is the fingering I recommend. And that's a nice little third position exercise for you.

There're two other places where you have to go into third position. You have to go in 34, but I shift ahead of time in bar 33. So, bar 33 has, you can start with an open A . . . So, that open A gives you plenty of time to shift. One, one, one, one, one . . . this is bar 34. There's your C-sharp. And then I dive right down, it's an octave shift, C-sharp to C-sharp.

The final place where you have to go into third position starts in bar 49, and actually, that is where I shift. Again, it's just a one octave shift, the same one you learned in bar 15. F-sharp to F-sharp, two to three. And then C-natural . . . I'd stay there . . . that's where I shift. Some people will disagree with me, because shifting after a fast sixteenth note is a little risky, but I like to live dangerously! So, I shift down in bar 51. I go . . . Shift down on that lower F-sharp. Okay, so it's a really good, beautiful application for when you're just starting out learning third position.

So, there's some food for thought for you on this very well loved piece, that I think I could play it a hundred thousand times and still not be tired of it. I hope that you will take the eighth note subdivision challenge. Thanks for watching and post your questions below. I will answer them personally. See you next time!

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