March 350th, 2020.

 One of the many,

many,

many

irritating things about the violin is that your ear is a few inches away from the soundhole, unlike the more civilized 1-4 feet given by...every other instrument. Playing generates a lot of little sounds and obnoxious harmonics that just aren't perceptible unless you have your head practically inside the instrument. Imagine the worst violin noise you've ever heard, and have some empathy for the poor player, who has it much worse.

(Low frequencies travel farther, and the gnarliest bits of violin sound are high frequency and low amplitude.)

Singers have the same problem, for the same reasons. If you try to sing so it sounds unambiguously good to you, you're almost certainly just bottling your voice up inside your throat and head, which are all full of resonating cavities and highly conductive bones bringing the sound to your ears.

(There are actually bone-conduction headphones, the wired version of which I tried out many years ago, and they didn't solve my problems, but they're cool and the sound is decent.)

You have to let your voice come out with some balance of nose and mouth. You can make some recordings to learn how you sound, take some lessons from a good voice teacher, and eventually you redefine what "good" means, so you can make it sound good for the audience, and you just spend less time sounding pretty for yourself.

All this to say that as I've been exploring my 5-string violin's viola capabilities, I've been wondering how it actually sounds. Putting a low C string on a violin––or a high E on a viola, for that matter––involves some funky and obscure design tradeoffs, between playability and the physics of tone. Some excellent makers have jumped right into the problem, with pricing around $6,000 at the low end, and $15,000-ish at the top (Jonathan Cooper, for example). That's a good deal for a pro-quality instrument, even if it illustrates the old adage that violin prices are like guitar prices, with an extra zero at the end. Mine was mostly made in (probably) China, and shipped to Gary in Minneapolis in some form. He took it apart if it wasn't already, added the electronics he invented, put it back together, and did the final setup of all the hardware bits: tailpiece, bridge, nut, strings.

(Having spoken with him at length, I would not be at all surprised if he checked all the front and back plate thicknesses, and did some re-graduating on them, as long as he had the thing in pieces already.)

Violas have a certain kind of growly tone, and I talked to Gary about what I was looking for: the punch of the lower register, with a pure but not strident upper register, since violin high notes kinda bug me. It doesn't have to look like an ordinary violin: I don't need to impress anybody, I'm not joining competitions or orchestras. I'm pretty sure my violin owes its rounded lower corners to a viola design I haven't had any luck finding, even though it's clearly a thing:

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Although I guess I don't have any proof that Eric Benning didn't invent them.

Luckily, over the past year I've been accumulating the bits and pieces of a home recording setup: a couple of inexpensive microphones, a Scarlett 2i2 (a USB interface that connects microphones to a computer), and a pre-amp for the violin.

(I asked Gary the Violin Guy if I couldn't just plug the violin directly into the Scarlett like a microphone, and he said "Well, you can try it, but it's probably expecting an impedance like a microphone's, around 3,000 ohms, and the piezoelectric pickup's impedance is a few million ohms." So, right. Pre-amp it is.)

Maybe on a little bit of a lark, I bought another bow, nicer than my current ones. Bows and bow-making are far more arcane even than making instruments. For centuries the prized wood has been pernambuco, and I don't entirely understand why. Pernambuco is not doing better than every other tropical hardwood, and incredibly, it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something. The primary replacement material is carbon fiber, which can certainly be achingly expensive, but for us mere mortals, you generally get a higher quality bow for the same money. I've been trying to not buy tropical hardwood stuff if I can avoid it, anyway. I got my other two bows re-haired so I could compare to the new one, and it's lovely, and I think quite suits my playing.