Meet the violin · From Zero to Mozart

You're going to spend years with this object. Before you play a note, learn what you're holding and what the parts are called — so every instruction after this one lands somewhere real instead of washing over you.

The violin

The violin, named. Hold yours next to this and find each part — the chin rest is really for your jaw, and the sound post inside matters more to the tone than anything you can see.

Hold yours next to the drawing and find each part as you read.

Start at the top. The carved curl is the scroll — decoration, and a handle. Four pegs pass through the pegbox; you turn these to tune, and they hold by friction alone, which is why they feel stiff at first. The strings leave the pegbox over the nut — a small notched ridge that fixes where each string starts — and run down the neck along the black fingerboard, the surface your left-hand fingers press the string against. There are no frets. Nothing marks where the notes are; your ear and your hand learn that.

Lower down, the strings cross the bridge: a thin, curved, unglued piece of maple standing up under string tension, carrying the strings' vibration down into the body. The two f-shaped holes — the f-holes — let the sound out. Directly under the treble-side foot of the bridge, hidden inside, a small wooden dowel called the sound post wedges the front and back plates apart. You will never see it, and it changes the tone more than almost anything you can. At the bottom the strings anchor to the tailpiece, which usually carries four fine tuners — little screws for adjustments too small for the pegs.

The bow

The bow, end to end. Tighten the hair with the screw before you play — about a pencil's width of gap in the middle — and loosen it every time you finish. Instructions constantly say which part to use: 'at the frog', 'upper half', 'whole bow'.

The end near your hand is the frog; the far end is the tip, or point. The screw at the frog end tightens the ribbon of hair — 150 to 200 strands of horsehair. Tighten it before you play, to about a pencil's width of gap between hair and stick at the middle, and loosen it all the way every time you finish.

The hair needs rosin — dried tree sap — to grip the string; fresh hair makes almost no sound until it's rosined. Never touch the hair with your fingers: the oil from your skin kills the grip in a stripe that takes weeks to wear off.

Do this now

Name every part out loud, touching it: scroll, pegs, nut, fingerboard, bridge, f-holes, tailpiece, fine tuners — then frog, tip, screw, hair. Tighten the bow to a pencil's width, then loosen it again. That last habit is the one worth building from day one.