that new-violin smell.

Seriously, though, I can still smell the varnish. I think it was finished a week or two before I picked it up.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, one cognitive challenge we have is the genuinely alarming angles we have to tilt over in a curve. It’s freaky, and 100% necessary.

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Motorcycle tires are an amazing technology, and the truth is that on pure dry pavement, and often wet as well, tires will grip really well at extreme angles. That’s why motorcycle tires have a round profile, instead of a car’s square profile.

So we tell each other: go ahead and lean the bike. The tires are better than you are.

This violin is better than me. I learn just by playing it. It has more dynamic range (quiet/loud), more depth of sound, crystal-clear high notes, a much more powerful (i.e. viola-like) C string. I know it makes me a better violinist because when I go back to any of my factory violins, I play them better as well.

It’s just very nice, and I love it.

another addition to the zoo.

Today is the 6-year(!) anniversary of picking up the violin! I thought it was 7, but my teacher points out he forgets, on account of the, uh…I dunno. 30-35 years of making music before that? The trumpet was a loss because I had braces and a developing case of PTSD from school, but I learned to read music, and when I went to boarding school I took guitar lessons and started singing. I still play guitar a lot. I don’t know how much I’ve improved over the years, but it’s my mother instrument. Piano would have ultimately been more useful, though it would have required a special education teacher to help me make sense of piano scores.

(I have trouble distinguishing details in a bunch of identical straight lines, which makes music an adventure, and piano scores just make my brain shut down.)

I’m buying a Nice Violin™: a 5-string by a guy who has mastered his craft and loves experimenting. He’s been collaborating with a fiddler/luthier who knows 5-strings inside and out and has been coaching the maker on what the sound and playability should be. The maker takes that back to his shop and just does his thing to make it sound like that. This is his fourth 5-string, so "#4" for short.

(I visited him over the summer: we thought we’d combine that with visiting Honor’s cousin in the same town. The cousin said "Oh, yeah! He’s a couple doors down, I helped him move his fridge." It cut down some travel time.)

It turns out I saw this one "in the white" in his workshop, unvarnished; he didn’t have it strung up, so I didn’t play it, but I did get to hold it up alongside the Dahlia (the model name for my current violin I’ve played for three years now). I’ll take pictures, but it’s a little silly how different they are.

I’m keeping the Dahlia, because while it’s an uncommonly good factory-built violin from China, if I take it out to a bar or whatever and it goes missing, that will be sad,  but it is replaceable. As is the bow I (will continue to) use, which is carbon fiber. The Dahlia also has a really, really good piezoelectric pickup in it, which is a handy thing to have around. Also I like playing it and it looks cool.

#4 deserves a name, and to tell the truth, the Dahlia might also. We’ll see what #4 tells me, beyond "you have a lot of practicing to do."