Having developed skills as a graphic artist in my youth I fell back on these abilities in order to carefully illustrate every step I was explaining in these hand outs. I then tested these hand-outs over a period of 20 years of teaching with various students and their parents. When carefully worded and illustrated, these hand-outs could enable me to make changes in students in a fraction of the time expected using only verbal and demonstration techniques. And I was pleased to find I could routinely get a predictable result. Parents loved the handouts and gave me much positive feedback. Parents told me it saved them tremendous amounts of time in lessons as well, resulting in the lessons becoming significantly more cost-effective.

In the following years, my experience of teaching as a University Professor required that I spent much time training University-level music students "how to teach." I developed, in depth, much more of these materials, as most of the music students were wind players, singers, pianists and other non-string students whose future careers would call upon them to go out and teach violin players in our public schools. These future teachers needed to have something to fall back on when they went out to our school systems to build their own programs. It worried me that they received only one college semester of violin training, which barely scratched the surface of the amount of instruction they needed in order to teach a stringed instrument correctly. Having these future teachers collect and make their own notebooks with my handouts gave them something to review later, when they needed the help the most, and this seemed to be the best way to truly help them.

In preparation for writing these books, I spent years of intensive research of every Violin Book I could lay my hands on as far back as I could find available. I also read the personal methods and very insightful articles published in string teaching journals from 1908 and forward by violin teachers from all over the world. I wanted to discover every practical idea that anyone had ever written down and ever used in teaching every aspect of the violin.

From all this material collected, I developed an extensive cataloging system and trialed and tested these materials on as many of my own students as I could. The hardest part was the compiling of the exact order for a natural presentation of these materials. Simplest language was formulated with which to convey these skills to less than amateur parents trying to help their children. New students were trialed over and over until the perfect, correct sequence and proper illustrations to get them past the Basic Hold of the instrument and Sound Production and into the correct playing of the instrument was codified.

These books grew and developed over the years as I grew and developed and experienced the results with them along the way. Starting from a series of illustrated handouts, they blossomed into a full fledged workable book series.