updates!

Developments since last time:

1.

The simpler loop pedal is a little irritating, but learning to tap my foot at the right moment is actually an important skill. Still waiting on the bigger looper from the seller, who has been a real pain.

2.

The mystery money is from a 401(k) that I had indeed forgotten about: I suspect either it was an automatic signup, or I got as far as participating because there was an employer match and it was free money? The plan shut down and rolled the money over to an IRA that will be created this week-ish, at which point I can roll them both into my other retirement accounts.

3.

After chatting my electricity-nerd friends, I learned that measuring an electric load can be a little tricky, and long story short, the $10 I saved buying the Belkin Conserve Insight instead of the Kill-A-Watt was more than wasted, in that there's a huge class of what's called "reactive load" which includes the biggest power users like, say, air conditioners, and is harder to measure than a "resistive load" like a light bulb: something about the phase of the motor canceling out the phase of the alternating current it's consuming.

With the correct tool, the rolling air conditioner is revealed to be consuming a much more intuitive 1100ish watts. So...yay!

improbable events.

What are the odds, really?

1.

I ordered a looper pedal to use with my violin, an electronic device that records a segment of your playing, then repeats it in a loop (hence the name). They're typically operated by a footswitch (since you're usually using your hands to play) and they come in levels of complexity, from basic ones with no indicators and a single footswitch, to monsters a couple feet wide with four or five switches. Some will play your phrase at half speed, or reversed, or whatever. I did some research and ordered one at about 75% of maximum complication, figuring I won't use a lot of it, but it has some features that would make my life simpler.

It arrived yesterday, a day early! But DOA. It's brand new! So I had a very expensive paperweight, while we do the replacement shuffle. I may have rage-ordered a much simpler one-switch model in the meantime. Will I like either one? Not sure.

This is Zoë Keating, a cellist who started here in the Bay Area, and popularized the idea of looping performance, especially on a classical instrument. At 6:07 they show the MIDI footswitch panel she uses to manipulate looping software on her laptop. This is the level of complication I was hoping to avoid by using a dedicated looper pedal.

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But for all that, if I try looping for anything more than amusement or practice, I may well end up writing code.

2.

I got a bizarre thing in the mail: a deposit confirmation from the investment firm Charles Schwab, for a considerable sum of money, attached to 1099-R forms for my 2020 tax return. The only note says "benefit lump sum." I've never seen a 1099-R before, and the Internet tells me it's a "retirement distribution," which is all well and good except that I checked on all my retirement stuff that I know about, and none of it has changed. Also I don't have a Charles Schwab account––or maybe I do, now!

This is unsettling because, while I won't claim to be on top of my finances, this is not the kind of thing I usually forget about. And while receiving money is great, there's usually a tax on that money, which is hard to pay accurately if you don't know what the money is.

3.

It's been viciously hot here, so we've been running air conditioners. Naturally, we figured we don't want to trip our circuit breakers––which would require an excursion into said vicious heat––and 2/3 of the house (built in 1938) runs on a single 20 amp circuit. So I busted out the circuit map, but then realized I had no idea how much power the A/C units used, and obviously it's a lot. Easy enough, I have a gadget for measuring a device's power usage. I started with the window unit in our bedroom, running on the Eco-Cool setting...about 75 watts. Ooookay...how about full blast...85 watts.

What?

How about the rolling unit in the office?

45 watts.

I'm expecting a power draw more like our microwave's 1500 watts. I looked at the manuals. The window unit mentions "4 watts" and "4400 watts," neither of which makes a ton of sense: a 20A circuit at 110V can only handle 2200 watts.

(Circuit breakers and fuses are measured in amps, but because the voltage is constant-ish, we usually take a shortcut and just talk about watts.)

20A is a normal household circuit breaker, so no one's going to sell a window A/C that uses twice that. And we already know empirically that the A/Cs don't trip the breakers when not run on the same circuit.

The other A/C unit's manual doesn't mention its power draw at all. I measure the usage again. I check the manual for the meter to make sure I'm not measuring in kilowatts by accident. I check against a 38W incandescent light bulb lingering in a floor lamp: the meter says 35W. Pretty solid, definitely not the orders of magnitude error I was expecting.

So apparently conservation technology has brought us to the point where I can run 3 air conditioners for at most 245 watts, which is 2-4 of the incandescent light bulbs we all used 15 years ago? My co-workers don't believe it either. But this is what data is for: because our intuitions are so often wrong.

fortuitous!

I got a violin I love just in time to learn how to shift my left hand up and down the violin. These are called "positions," and they're numbered, 1st through whatever (7th or 8th, I think, not used by normal humans). You might think, looking at the unmarked black expanse of the violin fingerboard, that finding a note is a pain in the ass, and you are 100% correct! This is why I have spent 2 years and 11 months learning to play in tune (with considerable if not universal success) via ear training and muscle memory, and now I get to learn to play in tune again. It's nowhere near as bad as I would have thought, though, because shifting to higher positions builds on the muscle memory of 1st position. (In 3rd position, your index finger goes where your ring finger was when you were in 1st position.)

I've also been drifting away from the Suzuki book, learning fiddle tunes instead, but the way to be able to tackle any fiddle tune is to play music harder than fiddle tunes, so I've been learning some Baroque stuff instead. Exhibit A is this Vivaldi concerto, starting with the third movement:

I like Yitzhak Perlman's version, partly because I have happy memories of seeing him on Sesame Street when I was a kid, but mostly because he plays it slower than the other versions I found.

The reason I'm glad to be learning this on a violin I love is that the notes are really high, and trying to play this stuff really separates out how good the instrument sounds and how well it's set up, and if I tried to do this on that stupid rental I happily returned last week, I would probably go nuts.

(Among other things, I always had this one problem where playing the pitch of the E string on the A string just sounded terrible no matter what I did. Probably in the future I could take that violin and make it sound good, but for learning now, it was just pissing me off. In the meantime, now I know what to check for when evaluating a violin for myself.)

So the fiddle is still marvelous. Since I can record it easily, I've started playing around with recording stuff, specifically multi-tracking some duets. Let me tell you, I have never encountered anything that exposes flaws in my playing like trying to accompany myself. It turns out that feeling like you're playing in tune, or even playing in tune with the previous phrase, is not that same as actually playing in tune the entire time. What a stupid fucking instrument.

Back later, I gotta go practice.

The Perfect Violin

Okay, I've had this fiddle for a couple weeks, but it's amazing. The website copy comes off as a little hyperbolic:

designed for the highly trained player who can focus and control the power of this new model

Okay...really? Plus the "new model" is something like 15 years old, and externally at least the only difference is that it's a whole lot less ugly: here's a 2007 model, and the finish is sort of meh, and it has that funky non-traditional scroll that I assume is easier and cheaper to carve. But not mine!

I'm not 100% sure I understand the drive towards beauty in instruments. The saying goes "It should make you want to pick it up and play," and that's ultimately a shallow, aesthetic impulse. As far as I know, that striping ("curl") of the maple back and neck doesn't affect the sound: those pieces rely on uniform density and strength to do their job. Violin makers judge wood primarily by tapping it to see what sound it makes, and then secondarily by how pretty it is, because that's just what players expect. 

Does the varnish matter? It's not controversial that coating the wood in the wrong material will affect the tone: imagine encasing all these vibrating parts in something rigid like epoxy. You want it to protect the wood, which often means filling in the pores, which should be constricted anyway by letting the wood dry-cure for as long as you can stand, but maybe some of the porosity is involved in giving the wood the flex to vibrate... Applying non-invasive technology to the good instruments of any age, we're learning what makes them tick, and notwithstanding our recurring belief in a lost Golden Age (of anything), modern makers can build you an instrument that will stand toe-to-toe with a Stradivarius or a Guarneri, for $50,000 instead of $50 million.

You see how the finish is a lighter color in spots? That's antiquing to make the instrument look older than it is, a practice about as old as the expensive violins themselves. For the most part, it's not fooling anybody.

Years ago, NPR did an interview with the sound engineer at BMW who was in charge of how a BMW's door sounds and feels when you shut it. It's a recognition that our experience of an object goes far beyond its function. Consciously or not, you can tell when a door has been thought through down to small details, and that sets us up to expect a similar depth of thought in the driving experience, which hopefully the car can deliver on. And, of course, it looks pretty.

The instrument and I are still getting warmed up, but it's a keeper. I don't qualify as "highly trained" yet, and it is definitely a more advanced instrument, every bit as particular and demanding and rewarding as my reading has led me to expect.

It's not something I would have shopped for, but I have been hoping my next keeper violin would have a stripey neck.

The sound from the internal pickup really is amazing, too.

This is fun.

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!

25% more strings!

I bought a violin. Well, sort of. It's a violin. It has five (5) strings instead of four (4), which as with the rest of the violin has been pretty standard since Andrea Amati, whose grandson taught Stradivari. It combines the viola, tuned C-G-D-A, with the violin, tuned G-D-A-E, for a distinctive instrument tuned (wait for it) C-G-D-A-E. You can play violin parts, or viola parts, or just have fun.

Like most such animals, I have a 5-string violin, so called because the vibrating string ("scale") length (which determines where you have to put your fingers to play a given note) is the same as a violin. Maine luthier Jonathan Cooper, at the top of his profession, calls his version a "5-string viola" because it has a violin scale length on a viola-ish body. Just to keep everyone on their toes, Swedish fiddler Mikael Marin plays a "5-string viola" with a viola scale length, because he's a violist, and his wife Mia plays a 5-string violin like mine (if much nicer). (Adorably, their instruments are from the same extremely distinctive Swedish maker). My teacher says mine sounds like a viola with an E string, which it may, although I'm pretty sure if you play an equivalent Actual Viola™ next to it, you'll hear the difference. I asked Fiddlershop to make the E string less...piercing, since "piercing" is sort of the violin's default mode, and the E string leads the charge.

It's ridiculous. Also, lots of fun.

This may not be the final 5-string. If you don't commission one–which may lie somewhere in my future, but that will be $6,000 and up, and I am neither wealthy nor a professional player–there are only a few places to buy one, and fewer still which are not random people selling on eBay direct from China, and I identified all of them well over a year ago. Having spent a couple weeks playing the Fiddlerman one exclusively, I decided to try out one of the other sources, which is this one guy in Minneapolis (Gary) who's a sort of inventor-musician. That will be interesting, since his instruments, built in China to his design, are physically larger than the Fiddlerman one–which is a regular-sized violin, maybe with some hidden tweaks–so I'll expect the low C string to have more depth and power to it. He also spent a decade creating a custom electrical pickup that faithfully re-creates the acoustic sound: piezoelectric pickups translate the vibrations of the instrument directly into an electrical signal, unlike a microphone, which produces the signal from the vibrations of the air which has been vibrated by the instrument. This mostly frees you from feedback, but piezo pickups inevitably suck some of the life out of the sound, to the extent that there's an active market in little boxes designed to put that life back in. If you listen to the samples on Gary's website, his pickup really is amazing. In a mix with other people, there's no way anyone would notice, and folks find it good enough to record with, given you're likely to add EQ and reverb anyway.

I'll definitely keep one of them. The Fiddlerman 5-string reminds me how indifferent I am to my current rental violin. I'll get a good 4-string as well, but I have a lot of fun going around and trying instruments, which is...not what I've been doing this year. And won't really be doing in the foreseeable future, since violin shops are the sort of small, low-ceilinged spaces you don't want to be spending a couple hours during a respiratory disease pandemic. So there might just have to be a 4-string which is Better Enough™ for now.

Internally, I have labeled the 4-string goal the Froofy Violin, the kind of sound you'd want as a classical soloist rather than as a fiddler. Froofy Violins have the kind of upper register that I need to learn to use, because you can't just go along avoiding whole ranges of your instrument, or the kinds of music written for it. Even the extent to which I've learned to manage the Indifferent Rental's high notes has really helped me with the 5-string.

Pretty fun, as pandemic projects go.

now with 33% more human.

We acquired a Bonus Teenager some weeks back. The pandemic weighs on everything, pressing us all out of shape, and households already under strain are not going to un-strain themselves. Long story short, J's friend X lives here now, until...later. He's been able to de-stress and keep talking to his family, so he's doing well.

Ironically, one of my brother's friends came to live with us (twice!) when I was a kid, and many of our friends we met here in California (some have moved on to bring their awesomeness to other states) have a similar story somewhere in their lives. It's a thing we can do.

One of the many changes is that J has someone to talk to, or sometimes just exchange monologues with. There's a marvelous early episode of Mythbusters where they investigate a myth that a duck's quack doesn't echo. I've never heard this elsewhere, but it resonated enough for Mythbusters to take it on, even if there was no obvious endpoint that involved fire, electrocution, or explosions.

(My friend group and I used to watch the show religiously.)

They find an acoustician and bring him out to some duck farm in the Central Valley, which picked a couple ducks (Bob and Roy) for them. They got the shoot all set up, and Bob the duck wouldn't quack. The show hosts are (or act like) City People™–not that growing up around ducks makes you an expert in making them quack–and host Jamie has an awkward little while trying to get a duck to quack.

They go to switch out Roy for Bob, and as the ducks pass each other, there's a festival of quacking. They just needed another duck there to listen.

Watching J and X is exactly like that. Left to his own devices, J will mostly not seek out social contact. But maybe it's never too late to have a sibling you get along with.

Incidentally, according to the Mythbusters wiki:

Initially, no echo could be found, so the team moved to an anechoic chamber for comparison. When examined by an audio expert, it was found that the echo was "swallowed" by the original quack, due to the very similar acoustic structure between the quack and the echo. Because of this, it may be difficult to tell where the quack ends and the echo begins, both having similar waveforms on an oscilloscope and blending together in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish. In the same way, human hearing may not perceive the difference between a duck's quack and its echo.