Doesn't matter what it is. It could be a single letter.
Hope I didn't waste too much of your time!
Tweet
Meanwhile, this cracked me up today, if anyone else grew up on video games:
I'll go first
Why you shouldn't use a shoulder rest,
Using a shoulder rest takes away from the intimate experience playing the violin. I'm not a fan of that word choice but there's something liberating about felling the vibrations from the wood on your shoulder. Also, it seems to give a less robotic sound as the instrument can move with you letting you express more musicality. I'm lucky to have A Del Gesu copy so I am able to do this.
Thats pretty much the formula. I'd be sort of interested in a thread that weaves through all of the above seamlessly, like a river into the ocean.
One of the longest threads I ever saw was whether the correct spelling was vampire or vampyre.
I blame Spohr!
While I'm thinking about it, what's the best way to store a shiny Chinese violin when living in a van?
One of the most disgusting things I see in pedagogy is when a violin teacher will sing a phrase in a baroque/classical piece with a beautiful and healthy vibrato, and then proceed to berate the student for using 'too much' when what the student plays is of a far lesser amplitude and frequency than what the teacher just sang.
Depends if it was finished in Cremona or not!
I figured that seven sentences containing at least six (and possibly as many as eight) instances of howling idiocy would elicit replies, and indeed that seems to be the case.
[EDIT: Literally the only thing in that post that can be taken at anything near face value is my interest in Baroque music.]
[ANOTHER EDIT: Julie O'Connor, further upthread, gave me the idea, however inadvertently. But shucks, I forgot to address "what is A".]
(1) How do I contact the Editor? My screen name is not in accordance with forum policies, and as far as I can tell only the Editor can change it. [EDIT: Never mind. Pretty sure I got this one figured out.]
(2) How great an effect, if any, does antiquing have on the sound of an instrument?
A fascinating experience. And he even uses our President's tailor!
Googling on the title of the clip produces https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=http://www.postpsychology.org/posts/24-kaprisa-filosofemy/&prev=search
An event featuring all 24 Caprices & "Aleatoric Philosophy." Perhaps he wanted it not to sound precise or over-educated? He seems to have a thing for autodidacts.
Buy a stethoscope, and put the earpieces in your ear canals. Now, tape the drum of the stethoscope to the body of your violin. Begin playing. That's it!
What's a "Real Musician" I've seen some professionals who don't have the slightest bit of musicality while some student violinist who do not have a perfect technique that will have more musicality then they will ever have.
In my experience, this forum has been very good overall, but the more discussions about politics this forum holds, the least I like it. This should be a forum about music, a place where one could be free of all those worthless and bitter political discussions we are tired of listening, hearing and reading anywhere, in which all participants think they hold the complete truth and just try to enforce their views ("change/open up other peoples' minds").
I must say that musical discussions here are among the best I've read anywhere online. People are well educated, polite, know what are they talking about and give great advice (I am particularly fond of a couple of users, but absolutely everyone has given me really good advice). But the political discussion threads are quite far from that. I'd strongly suggest either the prohibition of political threads in the forum... or as an alternative, giving the users the option of ignoring threads so that we don't even have to read their title whenever we enter into the discussion page if we don't want to.
Right-click on this page and select "View Page Source." Search for "this dude", which is the text for Lydia's clickable link. See how she did it. That is how you learn how to do simple things in HTML.
Now ... here is how you do it.
[A HREF="http://your.link.goes.here.com"]Your link text[/A]
So, Lydia's link becomes:
[A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D72g5n7E9mg"]this dude playing all 24 Paganini Caprices[/A]
However I have made one very significant change. The left brackets in the foregoing must instead be "less than" characters, and the right brackets must be "greater than" characters.
You can just copy my example, insert it into your post, change my place-holder link to yours, change my place-holder link text to yours, and finally change the left and right brackets to less-than and greater-than symbols.
It's very important that you TEST your link and that you make sure nothing on the rest of the page has been screwed up by the HTML that you've inserted, such as the page width or the formatting of the posts coming after yours.
- Misspellings on this website regarding a contest between which performances of the Bach Sonatas is the best is simply a diskrace.
- From now on, opera singers should always wear masks.
- Beethoven was so closed off to the opinions of others that as he became older he just stopped listening to anybody.
- Until this pandemic is over, none of us will be able to get a bowhaircut.
- When we can start playing in orchestras again, we'll have to sit six feet apart, and the conductor is going to need binoculars.
- All of the important violin performances ever made are on YouTube.
- The music critics who hate violinists should be taken down a peg or two.
There!!!
Please, everyone, be well and stay safe.
Sandy
EDIT: Having said that, though: back in February I finally got the chance to hear a Curtin violin up close and Oh. My ... The lower strings on that fiddle, and the G string in particular, had an almost viola vibe to them. Blew my mind, and gave me a lot more insight as to why a working pro would invest in a hock-your-house level of instrument.
Trevor: about those Baroque chin rests, I just assumed they were transparent and therefore probably fashioned from custom-blown and -fitted artisanal glass of the highest purity humanly achievable. I'd think that would tend to leave their durability open to question.
That was the 70s. Nowadays 3D printing should give us all kinds of cool violin parts, especially things like CR where there isn't a lot of voodoo about how different materials affect your tone (like there is for tailpieces, etc.)
I wonder if a glass chin rest has been made to suit a glass violin. Glass violins have been made; I've seen one in the Waterford Glass Museum in Ireland, but I don't remember if it had a chin rest. Glass violins are indeed "playable", if only in the sense that you can see them being demonstrated on YouTube, but they wouldn't be many violinists' first choice for real playing in the real world.
Trevor, some aspects of this conversation bring to mind an essay that was going around a while back, purporting to calculate the value of a human soul using a golden fiddle (as in "The Devil Went Down to Georgia") as the measurement standard.
Paul's mention of 3D printing prompted a YT search, yielding this fellow's demo of 3 3D-printed violin-ish thingies. Two sound horrible; another one is just about bearable.
Two other materials come to mind for fabricating a chin rest: graphite and pyrolytic boron nitride. Both are still more dense than rosewood or ebony.
That's another advantage of acrylic -- it's about as dense as ebony. Carving it would be a good job for CNC. You can just program the mill to turn the tool really slowly.
I believe I am but one of few in my orchestras who uses the term "pinky". Now I wonder why that should be :)
It would need further experiments to check whether the effect in a side mounted model was larger or not, but however I'm a believer in mounting a CR as lightly as possible, and with a serious dosage of cork or rubber for acoustic decoupling.
Was it because Shostakovich acquiesced? We may never know, but his subsequent works were certainly not inferior to his previous ones.
At first I read that as "Tchaikovsky's symphonies."
If anyone is interested, you can visit: insidemusicacademy.com
I hope you all have a musical summer!
I have just inherited a violin - and I am trying to find out more about it.
Does anyone recognise this monogram?
thanks!
My violin shop is officially closed during the covid crisis, but is open to individual customers by prior arrangement for things such as repairs and specific purchases, up to and including instruments and bows. While I was there to collect my violin I took the opportunity to purchase a new cake of rosin.
Highly recommended, especially if you play on "soloist" strings.
This obviously doesn't apply to classical music, but would it be physically feasible to string a small viola, say 15", G-D-A-E? And if so, would there be any reason to do so?
However, regarding the choice of string gauge, the E in particular, for what is in effect a 15" violin in A440 tuning, I'd rather leave that advice to the experts.
Two reasons:
- to save wrecking my viola intonation during violin lessons,
- so my young violin students could film me with apparently small hands on those smartphone thingies.
Big tone - a real "mezzo" violin!
Tagentially: back in February I finally got the chance to see and hear a Joseph Curtin violin up close for a couple of days, and ... wow. I don't think I've ever personally encountered a violin that sounded, for lack of a better word, richer. The G string was particularly memorable. I don't know what kind of hoodoo Mr. Curtin does on his violins, but it obviously works. If I had a house to hock I might think about it. ;)
If I were on the giving end of the problem and thought I could get away with it, I'd probably try taking bets.
Either way it sounds like a "didn't need the gig anyway" situation. ;)
It does take me a minute or two to re-calibrate when switching between 15.5" and 16" instruments. I'm still trying to decide whether to go for the more robust low end of the 16" or the easier handling of the 15.5" when I "upgrade" my primary viola in a year or so.
("Upgrade" is in quotes there because it's frankly a matter of sheer self-gratification rather than any real need. Some of my friends who'll never be professional auto racers own Corvettes and Porsches, too.)
4 out of the past 12 messages--not including this one--is practically spamming, and I'm not even a classical vio*ist in any meaningful sense of the term.
This discussion has been archived and is no longer accepting responses.
Violinist.com is made possible by...
Dimitri Musafia, Master Maker of Violin and Viola Cases
Violinist.com Guide to Online Learning
ARIA International Summer Academy
Johnson String Instrument and Carriage House Violins
Discover the best of Violinist.com in these collections of editor Laurie Niles' exclusive interviews.
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 1, with introduction by Hilary Hahn
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 2, with introduction by Rachel Barton Pine