We say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head.
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Fiddling
I've played violin for a bit more than 30 years -- except that for about 20 of them, I wasn't playing violin. Suzuki lessons from about 5 years old to about 14 years old, quit in disgust, took it back up when I was 35. I have a lot of fun with it nowadays.
If you're looking for abc notation of fiddle tunes, be sure to check out The Fiddler's Companion.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I was once again unable to resist cutting up my fiddle, though I think with potentially better results (cf.) this time. I bought a new C string -- a Super Sensitive Red Label from Musician's Friend -- and found it a huge improvement on the string that had come with the instrument. Suddenly I wanted to play on the bottom strings which made me notice a problem with the bridge; namely, when I cut grooves for the strings I did not make enough space to accomodate the width of the C string. So I cut a little more away and have been playing almost exclusively for the past couple of practice sessions on the bottom 3 strings. See whatcha think of this recording I made of "Walkin After Midnight" : After Midnight by The Modesto Kid
Bob and Janis are coming over this afternoon to play some tunes -- I'm eagerly anticipating my first jam using the custom shoulder rest I carved this morning. Ever since I got this fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on Odds & Ends last week.) Turns out I was right! It's extremely comfortable to hold the violin with this extension.
I've been listening to some old (well not that old I guess but from like last year) Mountain Station tracks lately and enjoying our sound. And it is just getting better -- our new "St. James Infirmary" is a different, more organized and complex song than our first recording of it.
Also -- bought a pickup for the fiddle, I decided to get a saxophone pickup that will clip onto the bell. This will help with amplification when we play at Studio 12 in Montclair next Friday.
John came over tonight and we had some fun playing songs we did not know... It was a change from our practice routine because John had left our songbook in Andrea's car, so we did not have words and music written out, so we just jammed on a bunch of songs that we have not played before. Highlights included "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (which I find incredibly fun to sing but do not have much of a fiddle part to), "Harvest Moon" (which turns out to be really easy to come up with a fiddle part for), "When the Ship Comes In" (fast, with lots of instrumentals -- not sure what song the instrumentals were from but they seemed to fit ok), "Banks of the Ohio" (dedicated to Martha -- again, a lot of fun to sing, not sure what I should do instrumentally), "Rolling in my Sweet Baby's Arms," "Frankie and Johnny." Also, "Long Black Veil," and a medley of "Odds and Ends" into "Johnny 99."
The fixed fiddle sounded all right. It was going out of tune more than usual, which I put down to the new strings; the tone is clear and even and the volume is there. An irritating buzz I had noticed in recent weeks is gone -- not sure if that had anything to do with the bridge.
Well... that modification I made to my fiddle's bridge last month did not work out so well, as it turns out. Some notes on what came of it and what I think my mistakes were.
What I did was to take a small amount of material off the top of the bridge to lessen the vertical pressure on the bridge so that it would not buckle. However, I was not thinking about how the tension of the strings has to remain constant (assuming they are to be in tune, which is desirable); so relieving the vertical pressure on the bridge would put additional horizontal pressure on the tailpiece. After a couple of weeks I noticed that it was getting difficult to keep my violin in tune; "difficult" soon became "impossible" and I had to sit down and figure out what was going on.
Some examination of the instrument made it clear that the tailpiece was no longer fixed stably to the body. So I got a chance to learn about how tailpieces are connected to violins: There is a little piece of vinyl cord called a tail gut, with threaded connectors on each end, that go into holes in the end of the tailpiece. On a traditional violin this cord loops around the end pin; on my Stroh fiddle as you can see to the left, it loops around a bolt in the violin body (usually covered by a metal attachment for the chin rest). Tail guts are cheap, which is useful as I went through a couple before figuring out that the problem was the bridge... Now I have a brand-spanking new bridge (manufactured by Aubert, courtesy of Menzel Violins -- not expensive and vastly better than the bridge that came with the fiddle) and everything is looking shipshape. I'll be jamming with Mountain Station this afternoon and see how it sounds...
A few things I learned about my violin:
I need to pay attention to the way the strings are wrapped on the pegs. I sort of knew this as an abstract rule but had not really been following it.
The bridge is not bilaterally symmetrical. The bass side is higher than the treble side, and putting it on the violin backwards is a mistake.
It's important to keep the bridge perpendicular to the body of the violin. It has a tendency to lean forward as you tighten the strings, and you need to correct for this.
posted morning of October second, 2011: 1 response
(in which I take a carving chisel to my fiddle and fail to destroy it)
Ever since I got my Stroh fiddle last May, I have felt like the bridge was not quite accurately fitted to the violin, in in two regards. The way it transmits sound to the resonator is via a brass extension -- the bridge rests on the metal, so vibrations from the strings pass into the brass and move the resonator cap. But the brass ledge is not quite as wide as the feet of the bridge; they extend into the air a few millimeters on either side, so some fraction of the sound is being lost. Not a whole lot I can do about that; but furthermore, the bridge was slightly too tall -- when the strings were at full tension it buckled slightly. This meant the feet were not fully in contact with the brass, and sound was being lost that way as well.
So all this year and a half I have been meaning to whittle a little bit of height off the top of the bridge. It seemed like it would be a really easy repair to make; the odds of screwing up were low and in a worst case scenario, I would only need to replace the bridge. Still I felt squeamish about taking a knife to the fiddle... Tonight after a year and a half of procrastinating, I finally did it -- it was quick and easy and the sound post-repair is noticeably cleaner and brighter than before. Nice! As far as the width of the brass, I think to fix that would involve finding a new brass extension of the correct size -- a narrower bridge would be a poor solution. But for now I am quite content with the fix; doing this kind of work on the instrument brings me into closer contact with it and makes it more fully my fiddle.
Update: This did not really work very well. See this post for an analysis of why not, and what I ended up doing.
Jonathan Ward of Excavated Shellac has a bunch of great new music posts up;* old recordings of flamenco, Turkish music, West African pop... particularly up my alley is a guest post from Swedish psychotherapist Tony Klein. A few years ago at a flea market in Uppsala, Klein found an old record of Signe Flatin Neset playing the traditional Norwegian tune «Skuldalsbruri» ("The Bride from Skuldal") on Hardingfele, a Norwegian fiddle with four resonating strings under the melody strings. Listen to the recording at box.net, and read Klein's post about the music and the artist.
*(Hmm, no, this is not correct. They are a bunch of old posts from the archives that Google Reader and/or WordPress decided should be reported as new today. This is a good thing as it exposed me to some fine music; but if you head over to Jonathan's blog the latest post you will see is from a couple of weeks ago.)
(Oh and speaking of great music to listen to, NPR's First Listen is now streaming Gillian Welch and David Rawling's new record, The Harrow and the Harvest, for free. Thanks for the link, cleek!)
This is my grandfather's violin, which I've been playing (with significant interruptions) since I was 12 years old or thereabouts. Today I gave it away, to my daughter. A couple of thoughts --
Wow, Sylvia is playing a full-size violin now! It seems like the transition from ¼-size did not take a very long time.
I have really switched over pretty completely to the Stroh fiddle in the year or so I've had it. It feels like my native instrument now. I was playing this violin with Bob and Janis earlier today and noticing it felt a little foreign, the sound was not the Stroh sound which I have acclimated to.
I took the pickup off; if you're looking for a cheap Barcus Berry transducer to mount on your violin, give me a holler. It is nothing fancy but it served me well. Of the two stickers on the case, Sylvia will be keeping "Katze und Mädchen, ein komisches Paar" and getting rid of "Future Corpses of America" -- probably a wise decision. Need to get a better bow for Sylvia as I cannibalized the good bow for my Stroh fiddle.
Sylvia was going through the stuff in the outer pocket of the case and found sheet music for "Old Joe's Hittin' the Jug", which I had forgotten I had, and the dvd of Elixirs and Remedies. (Which, nice, I'm watching now.)
posted evening of April 30th, 2011: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Well out of a year and a bit of jamming together, John and I have put together something worth listening to (IMO obviously). You can download our demo tape from box.net if you'd like to check it out. (Click the "Download Folder" button to get the tape as one big .zip file.) Streaming here:
Track list
"Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan (with a bit of fooling around with the lyrics from yours truly)
"NJ Transit" by Jeremy
"Dancing Barefoot" by Patti Smith
"Revelator" by Gillian Welch
"Shady Grove," traditional
"California Stars" by Woody Guthrie and Wilco
"St. James Infirmary," traditional
Mountain Station is John Hicks on guitar and vocals, Jeremy Osner on Stroh fiddle and vocals. Follow us on Facebook to see new songs when we record them, and works in progress...
Update -- I am thinking with this post I'll be taking a brief hiatus, a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, those of you who stop by regularly -- I'll be back, just want a little time off.
Please help us find our audience! If you are reading this post and you like the music, I would greatly appreciate links back, from your blog or your rss reader or Facebook, whatever. Help get the word out...
fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on 
After a couple of weeks I noticed that it was getting difficult to keep my violin in tune; "difficult" soon became "impossible" and I had to sit down and figure out what was going on.
can see to the left, it loops around a bolt in the violin body (usually covered by a metal attachment for the chin rest). Tail guts are cheap, which is useful as I went through a couple before figuring out that the problem was the bridge... Now I have a brand-spanking new bridge (manufactured by Aubert, courtesy of 
via a brass extension -- the bridge rests on the metal, so vibrations from the strings pass into the brass and move the resonator cap. But the brass ledge is not quite as wide as the feet of the bridge; they extend into the air a few millimeters on either side, so some fraction of the sound is being lost. Not a whole lot I can do about that; but furthermore, the bridge was slightly too tall -- when the strings were at full tension it buckled slightly. This meant the feet were not fully in contact with the brass, and sound was being lost that way as well.
