25% more strings!

I bought a violin. Well, sort of. It's a violin. It has five (5) strings instead of four (4), which as with the rest of the violin has been pretty standard since Andrea Amati, whose grandson taught Stradivari. It combines the viola, tuned C-G-D-A, with the violin, tuned G-D-A-E, for a distinctive instrument tuned (wait for it) C-G-D-A-E. You can play violin parts, or viola parts, or just have fun.

Like most such animals, I have a 5-string violin, so called because the vibrating string ("scale") length (which determines where you have to put your fingers to play a given note) is the same as a violin. Maine luthier Jonathan Cooper, at the top of his profession, calls his version a "5-string viola" because it has a violin scale length on a viola-ish body. Just to keep everyone on their toes, Swedish fiddler Mikael Marin plays a "5-string viola" with a viola scale length, because he's a violist, and his wife Mia plays a 5-string violin like mine (if much nicer). (Adorably, their instruments are from the same extremely distinctive Swedish maker). My teacher says mine sounds like a viola with an E string, which it may, although I'm pretty sure if you play an equivalent Actual Viola™ next to it, you'll hear the difference. I asked Fiddlershop to make the E string less...piercing, since "piercing" is sort of the violin's default mode, and the E string leads the charge.

It's ridiculous. Also, lots of fun.

This may not be the final 5-string. If you don't commission one–which may lie somewhere in my future, but that will be $6,000 and up, and I am neither wealthy nor a professional player–there are only a few places to buy one, and fewer still which are not random people selling on eBay direct from China, and I identified all of them well over a year ago. Having spent a couple weeks playing the Fiddlerman one exclusively, I decided to try out one of the other sources, which is this one guy in Minneapolis (Gary) who's a sort of inventor-musician. That will be interesting, since his instruments, built in China to his design, are physically larger than the Fiddlerman one–which is a regular-sized violin, maybe with some hidden tweaks–so I'll expect the low C string to have more depth and power to it. He also spent a decade creating a custom electrical pickup that faithfully re-creates the acoustic sound: piezoelectric pickups translate the vibrations of the instrument directly into an electrical signal, unlike a microphone, which produces the signal from the vibrations of the air which has been vibrated by the instrument. This mostly frees you from feedback, but piezo pickups inevitably suck some of the life out of the sound, to the extent that there's an active market in little boxes designed to put that life back in. If you listen to the samples on Gary's website, his pickup really is amazing. In a mix with other people, there's no way anyone would notice, and folks find it good enough to record with, given you're likely to add EQ and reverb anyway.

I'll definitely keep one of them. The Fiddlerman 5-string reminds me how indifferent I am to my current rental violin. I'll get a good 4-string as well, but I have a lot of fun going around and trying instruments, which is...not what I've been doing this year. And won't really be doing in the foreseeable future, since violin shops are the sort of small, low-ceilinged spaces you don't want to be spending a couple hours during a respiratory disease pandemic. So there might just have to be a 4-string which is Better Enough™ for now.

Internally, I have labeled the 4-string goal the Froofy Violin, the kind of sound you'd want as a classical soloist rather than as a fiddler. Froofy Violins have the kind of upper register that I need to learn to use, because you can't just go along avoiding whole ranges of your instrument, or the kinds of music written for it. Even the extent to which I've learned to manage the Indifferent Rental's high notes has really helped me with the 5-string.

Pretty fun, as pandemic projects go.