Violin's Sister

March 25, 2006 at 6:06 AM

Today the stork brought Violin's Sister. Well, ok, it was really UPS, not the stork, but Violin's Sister showed up on our doorstep about 12:14 PM today.

Who is Violin's Sister, you ask? She is a Cardinal RED Yamaha SV-200 Silent Practice violin. Red Red Red. Ok, and black and a bit of natural maple. And RED.

So, I open up the box. Uhhh. The bridge isn't installed. But there are instructions. Well, ok. I'll give it a shot. So I loosen the strings, which are already pretty loose, and slip the bridge in.

Now to try to tune her...

Uhhh, Uhhh. She only has one fine tuner on the E string.

Now please don't laugh, but I've never even turned a peg, and it takes me 15 minutes to get Sister tuned. When I pick her up about an hour later, she's out of tune again. So I tune her again. This happens again about an hour later. Each time she's a bit less out-of-tune. Which is a good sign, I hope.

Do you think she is going out of tune because I need to use some peg dope (which I don't have, so I'll have to go to the music store.) Or could it be because the strings are new? Is it just that I don't know what I'm doing? I'm pushing in the pegs as I turn them.

Violin stays in tune, or close, all the time, so this is new for me.

Sister sounds very nice. Perfectly audible without electronics, but plug in the earphones and she has a much better sound than I expected. Not as beautiful as Violin, of course, but much better than the more inexpensive traditional violins I tried.

The other thing that surprised me was how light Sister is. I had expected her to be heavier than Violin, but she isn't. We'll be going to Europe this summer and she should travel well. It's a relief to have her; I won't have to worry about Violin getting damaged in transit.

Of course Violin's sister needed a case of her own, so I bought a gig bag from Yamaha...

a Red gig-bag.

(Did I mention that she's Red?)

(Red, Red, Red)

From Jim W. Miller
Posted on March 26, 2006 at 12:31 AM

Electric violin isn't a sister, it's an evil snarlin cussin biotch of a step sister. My kind of woman!

From Jim W. Miller
Posted on March 26, 2006 at 3:04 AM

Evil, snarling, cussing, car-wrecking, prescrition-forging, shoplifting clothes, kicked-out biotch of a step sister.

From Ben Clapton
Posted on March 26, 2006 at 4:09 AM

the strings are probably new strings, and do take a while to settle in. once they're settled in, you should be ok, but you will need to tune it slightly each time you use it, just to make sure it's in tune.

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Violin's Sister

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