try again.

5-string violin #2 arrives on Monday. I have some hopes for the sound and playability both being more to my liking, with the design being specific to the purpose: 5-string violin #1 is, I suspect, an ordinary 4-string body with a properly-sized neck and fingerboard. It is lovely, but the neck feels a little chunky, I'm not sure about the bridge shape, and it has these odd moments of producing some funky tones, as though the air inside can't keep up with what the strings are doing. Nothing as awful as a wolf tone, just some odd harmonics when I don't expect them and can't explain it from what I'm playing.

A purpose-built 5-string violin.

The curved bulges there on the bottom, instead of the usual sharp corners, are borrowed from some violas, with the same goal of creating a larger acoustic chamber to give more oomph (depth, volume, timbre, etc.) to the lower notes. If I understood the seller correctly, the string spacing and neck have some tweaks to keep it from feeling chunky (as 5-string #1 often does). I'm excited about the pickup, too, since I'm experimenting with recording, and I'd be happy to have a bit less friction than I get with microphones and the poor acoustics of my office.

(I have a little gooseneck microphone, which actually captures the sound very well, but it is awkward in every way, and not as easily applied to my other instruments as I'd hoped.)

I've been wanting to order what is modernly called a "cittern" from this one particular Swedish maker, but I've been putting it off, not sure if I'd actually play the thing–although usually if I ask myself that question more than a few times, the answer is "yes."

As fate would have it, a shop in Berkeley that I was already planning to visit because of a 4-string there I really liked, has a couple of that maker's instruments, becoming the only seller in the U.S.!

As fate would further have it, we experienced some poor planning around the fact that only one of our cars is running right now, so my chiropractor-driven visit to Berkeley was canceled. So...another time!