Sunday, June 6, 2021

the zoo.

I just got another entry in my endless quest for a travel violin. I wouldn't take it gigging, but I'm always on the lookout for something lightweight and durable, easier to, yannow. Travel with. On airplanes particularly. One challenge is getting annoyed with an instrument that has less expressive range than I do; the ultimate answer to that is just to put up with the inconvenience and bring the real violin. It's not like it's a cello or a bass: it fits fine in the overhead compartment. Still, I dream.


The Cricket shows promise, though. Pretty much any violin made specifically for traveling–and there are not many–is based on the pochette, which dance teachers would carry around for accompanying their students. As that article shows, they sounded awful, as a rule, so people have put a little bit of modern knowledge and technology into making them nicer to play and to listen to. You can see this guy's travel and pochette fiddles, and the traveler models have eye-watering prices for something I'd expect to be tramping around with, or even just tossing into cars. (I think he just does them for fun, and for his day job he's a hydrologist or something.)

Magic Fluke is primarily a ukulele company, and this bears some signs of being built for fun by people who don't set up violins for a living, in particular a sharp corner at the top of the fingerboard, right where the hand will hit it every time. I also thought it was sounding quiet, so I repositioned the bridge closer to where it's supposed to be, which was a 10-15x volume increase; but I will bring it to an actual violin guy, who will make it sound its thin, reedy best, and can sand down that corner in a way that will not make it worse (he can even do it symmetrically on each side). I have an extra set of somewhat nicer violin strings, too, which will probably help.

(Solid-body electric violins sound more or less the same no matter the size, free of the heartless physics of sound waves in air; for the same reason, they're better able to sound good across a wider range of frequencies, so 5 or 6 strings require no fancy engineering adaptations. But, like electric guitars, their musical power without their extremely heavy support systems is pretty much zero.)

Here's my current list of instruments:

  • Dahlia 5-string violin.
  • Cricket Violin by Magic Fluke.
  • Cecilio Sparkly Blue Electric Violin. (Marked for deaccession.)
  • Fiddlerman Artist Viola.
  • Unsatisfactory travel violin, built by a random guy on the Internet.  (Marked for deaccession.)
  • 1970s patent-infringing Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-18 guitar.
  • Blueridge tenor guitar (4 strings).
  • Line 6 Variax Standard. (Electric guitar that emulates the sound of many other guitars.)
  • Eastman MD505 mandolin.
  • J. Bovier solid-body electric mandolin.
  • Large octave mandolin/small Irish bouzouki, by Bigleaf Mandolins. (Marked for replacement.)
I ordered a weird Swedish thing from Sweden, but the guy won't start building it until November, so I really don't think it should count...