Rosie C

I'm going with "The Switchblade Dog Experience" 👍

No longer listed on ebay!

I started with Garageband and a little Berhringer 4-channel mixer with USB. A cheap way to get into digital music, though I found Garage Band a slippery slope to Logic Pro. Reaper seems pretty good though - we have to use it next year at uni so I've been starting to use it.

The walls in my practice room are painted Harp Strings. The woodwork is Inky Prose.

I visited a recording studio last week to help a friend out. I was meant to just be playing mandolin and accordion, but as his band was 'between bass players' at the time I was asked to dep on bass guitar too...

Hmmm... 🤔 However, this one isn't bad...

I would robustly disagree with "musical genius"! You're right though that the skills from viola & mandolin have the possibility to combine to make for a really good start on violin. But I have two reasons for getting a teacher - I'm hoping a teacher will help address issues quickly and speed up my progress, especially as our band has some summer gigs that I think would benefit from some fiddle-playing. Also, I've been convinced that folk is better learned by ear from a folk musician rather than from reading dots. My teacher does 1-1 lessons but also hosts group Zoom lessons, which is a nice way to learn and I expect after a few months I'll just do the Zoom sessions.

Yes, this is the route I'm going - practice and ear training. I have a teacher lined up - she does 1:1 lessons and also does group Zoom lessons. First one 5.30 this evening!

I took part in my first professional recording sessionthis morning! Due to recent band changes I ended up laying down bass guitar, octave mandolin and piano accordion. Just to keep me on my toes, the song was in the key of D♭, OK on bass and mando but a pain in the proverbial on accordion. But it was a lot of fun being in a professional studio and seeing how things worked - very different to recording stuff at home with my Zoom recorder!

It is! I had anaphylaxis and had an ambulance etc. last year, a few weeks before I had to record my end of year project for uni. Flex pitch saved the day when my voice wasn't 100% recovered. It also helped fix slight pitch issues for a multi-tracked 4-part recorder piece. I did admit this in my [write] up.

My modest rig - Orange 25B practice amp and Squier fretless jazz. I didn't think I needed anything else, then I saw @Yorkshire Bottom End's Trace Elliot cabinets... 🙄

I love the look of those 110 TE cabinets!

I'd be happy getting the same make & model - Aria Pro II Wildcat in white. But it would need to be exact. I keep looking on ebay, but white with the earlier P/J pickups seems pretty rare. Nothing particularly special about them except my dad bought me one as a kid. Here's one in red...

Exactly! I have an Orange amp with gain and built in chorus & reverb. Muhahaha! Frets would certainly save me a lot of grief - I've muscle memory from playing the larger viola, so particularly third-finger notes I'm playing a bit sharp. My double bass has a sneaky strip of electrician's tape across where the fifth fret would be, but I'm going 'cold turkey' with my violin, trying to train my ear.

I've played classical viola for a few years - but got increasingly bored with the typical viola parts, with all the good bits of tune going to violin and 'cello. Then I got into folk music, and playing folk tunes meant for violin on viola was just making my life unnecessarily hard, especially as I'm not a particularly good player. So yesterday my viola got chopped in on a violin! I went to the shop expecting to buy a basic acoustic student instrument. But this beasty was up on a high shelf - too high to make out the price tag. But I asked and it was surprisingly affordable. I love its style - a sort of clash between very modern but with hints of the mediaeval. First play I had that instant feeling it was the one I was going to buy. Built-in electric pickup is a bonus and being semi-acoustic it's quiet for practice.

Edit: I already posted this 2-3 weeks ago! 😖

Yes, my Squier jazz - and I went as far as to sell all my other three basses as I so rarely played them!

I use forScore - currently with about 600 tunes on it. Generally it's very good, but can get a bit confused if you have several iPads on the same account. I think it's free now, but yes there's an upgrade to 'pro' but that doesn't give a lot more.

The impertinence! 😡

Thanks for your kind words about my recorder tone! Much of the tone is from the instrument - a Mollenhauer Adri's Dream, wooden and modelled on renaissance-era recorders. As well as having a sweet tone, it's quite loud, so I don't have to blow too hard. I have another wooden recorder -a Moeck Tuju but it's more like a traditional school recorder. "I am encouraged to play more." <<< this is fantastic! & I'll PM you the music we're playing in the video...

Thanks for a clearer explanation than mine! Also, if you ever fancy guesting on viol on recordings of John Playford style ballads, or instrumentals by the likes of Michael Praetorius, drop me a DM!

I have this one...

Oh I wouldn't say that, I only mentioned it to show [some] of us take recorder seriously - grade 4 only puts me in about the same league as 12 year old school kids. I do play recorder at gigs though - it works well for an instrumental verse, and I've mastered tucking it under my arm while playing mandolin. I usually ask the audience whether they played recorder at school - before playing mine through a PA. Muahahaha! I think this was the first video we made, and we're both a bit put off by the camera - I look like I'm reading the music from off-screen, though I'm not. We're working on material now to set up a proper YouTube channel over the next month or two.

Let's go back into the midsts of time to Pythagoras... he made an instrument with one single long string on it - much like a bass guitar. He played the open string - let's say it was a C. Then he had an assistant 'fret' it at the 2/3rd and it sounded a G. Then they did 2/3rd again and it played a D. They kept doing this and filled out the scale, and eventually when all 12 tones were played they arrived back at C. Except it didn't, because the octave of any note is 2x the frequency, whereas all those 2/3rd divisions added up to a very slightly different number. This error is called the Phythagorian comma and it's a largely unsolvable problem with musical tuning. Back in the days of Bach and co. they used different tuning systems such as "just intonation", which meant that each key had a different feel (Spinal Tap and "D minor is the saddest of keys" actually has a root in history), and a composer would choose a key for a particular mood. (I think this is why so many classical pieces make a point of including the key in the name - but don't quote me on that!) Skipping forward a little, Victorian factory owners mass producing pianos, they used a tuning called "Equal Temperament" where the tuning was an approximation with most notes a little bit out of tune. It meant you could play a tune in any key and it would sound OK, but you lost the idea of keys having different emotional qualities. Modern instruments that can't play any pitch such as an accordion, piano, organ play equal temperament. Some notes are reasonably in tune, others (as @zbd1960 says) can be quite out, particularly thirds. Instruments that can vary the pitch - violins & other strings, brass & woodwind with a decent player with embouchure, fretless bass. If you leave a group of these players to their own devices, they'll naturally drop into a tuning that is not equal temperament where the music sounds sweeter. If this is interesting I can recommend "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony" by Ross Duffin: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0393334201/

I will, in the morning, after coffee.