stupid instrument.

I enjoy complaining about the violin, partly because it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but the truth is I'm pretty good at it, which is not so incredible, once you start grading on a curve. It's the same way a native English speaker like me with 3 years of studying French under their belt will be much more capable than the same person would be after 3 years of studying any form of Chinese.

(Unless you're Anna, whose natural aptitude with languages exceeds my natural and rarely-mentioned aptitude with weapons.)

Any teacher loves a student who wants to learn and will put the effort into it, and my teacher is no exception. It turned out we have a lot of tastes in common, particularly fiddle traditions, up to and including Scandinavian music, which is not for everyone––even I much prefer playing it to listening to most of it.

(Recall that the difference between a violin and a fiddle is that no one minds if you spill beer on a fiddle.)

And Baroque music, so I can play through a small Vivaldi concerto, and I was a bit off in the weeds being determined to play this Bach keyboard invention, so now I can play through it, too:

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He does love a ton of standard violin repertoire that I don't, and I'll end up learning some of it anyway because that's what one does. I expect it will, again, be much more fun to play than to listen to.

Even though my 5-string covers the viola range, I've been eyeing violas for some time. Physics means my violin's 14" air chamber cannot produce the same sort of tone or volume as that of a viola. Apparently violas aren't acoustically perfect either, because if they were, they'd be too long to play.

(I've seen websites where builders complain about this, citing their own frustrations in arguing that 5-strings are pointless, which seems pretty obviously untrue. In particular, they vent about how the low G on a violin barely sounds okay, and the low C on a viola of any size is even less okay. It's worth noting that building a violin is not exactly easier than playing one, though I'm sure it's a quick transition once you've been building cabinets for a decade.)

Maybe we can blame Anders Hall, of Nordic Fiddlers Bloc and SVER, who makes folk viola look awesome. Anyway, I bought a starter viola––probably smaller than his, but who knows. (Violin sizes are standardized, if nonsensically named according to fractions having no relationship to any of the instrument's dimensions. Violas are categorized by body length, in half-inch increments.)

It arrives tomorrow! So we'll see.