squeak squeak squeak

I'm enjoying my violin, which sounds mostly tolerable and only occasionally appalling. It's often said the violin family are the instruments best able to mimic the human voice, and at the right moments, my violin certainly sounds just like the voice of someone in extreme torment. At other moments, it sings the unhappy keening of a cat in heat: truly a versatile instrument!

I do come to the violin with several advantages over 5th-grade children in the 80s:

1. Decades of experience teaching me that difficult things are difficult, and the only rational response is to accept that you're a beginner and practice a lot.
2. 25(!) years of playing guitar, which is, from a broad physics perspective, identical to the violin.

#2 may not be entirely obvious, but they share more terminology than not. The strings start at the head, wrapping around the tuning pegs (which are often just called tuners on a guitar, where they are also geared, as on the violin's larger siblings); pass over the nut and continue down the neck, over the fingerboard to the bridge and ending in the tailpiece. There are also top/back/sides, and, one of my favorite names, purfling.

I know all this because (a) I learn stuff easily enough that it's my all-consuming hobby; (b) when I first picked up the guitar, I had a copy of The Guitar Handbook, which, along with a string-winder, should be issued to every new guitarist; and (c) the Internet.

One handy thing the guitar has are frets, metal bars on the fingerboard which show you where to put your fingers. The violin presents you with an undifferentiated expanse of black. You get to learn, probably by ear-abusive trial and error, the muscle memory of where your fingers go.

Happily, the frets on a fretted instrument (guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, etc.) are not placed and spaced by accident, nor even by art, but by the glories of science! The quick version is that the frets get predictably closer together as the string gets shorter and the pitch gets higher. The violin is quite a bit shorter than the guitar, but I've been playing guitar a long, long time and I have a pretty good feel for where the frets should be.

...leaving me free to observe how cramped my fingers are.

Here are the things that have to go right for a violin to make some basic, passable music:

• The bow must be at the right tension.
• The bow must have the right amount of rosin on it.
• You must be applying the right amount of pressure on the bow.
• The right amount of pressure is different on the ends and the middle.
• You must be moving the bow at the right speed.
• You must be moving the bow perpendicular to the strings.
• You must place your fingers precisely on the unmarked fingerboard, with a margin of error that is essentially zero.
• You must do all of these things at the same time and coordinated with each other.

This leaves out how you hold the bow, angle of the violin, and various other body mechanics.

Sooo, yeah. That's why I'm taking violin lessons. Should keep me off the streets for a while.