9:01pm May 2, 2012

That has been going well. I think.

Trying the violin for the past couple of days. I’ve discovered:

1. Fingering is very good, few errors for something I haven’t done in over 20 years. I’m starting to think finger things like that may be my strong suit. Like typing. Anything that can turn into muscle memory after a certain point. And I learned it early enough for my movement disorder not to affect it much. If a violin exists my fingers know roughly what to do.

2. Finger vibrato and wrist vibrato are excellent. At least, by the idiosyncratic way I learned them (nobody ever taught me).

3. I don’t think my fingers are long enough to do arm vibrato the way a video showed. They’re barely long enough to play the g string properly. (Nobody believes how small my hands are until they hold up theirs for comparison and almost always are bigger. Hovering around the 5th percentile is small.) I didn’t know arm vibrato existed separately from the other two forms. That explains some things. (Seriously anything about controlling tone and stuff, I had to work out for myself or copy from better players when they weren’t looking. I stopped playing violin at an earlier age than other kids started playing violin so they didn’t really know what to do with me except keep advancing me up the seating chart until they couldn’t anymore.)

3. I can improvise. Never could as a kid. But that has a lot to do with the Great Brain Shift in adolescence.

4. But maybe I should think of my other hand for awhile. Because my bowing is what I really, really need to work on. I’m left handed so it almost figures my fingering and vibrato are better than my bowing, at least after 20 years of nothing. (I’m still confused by why standard violins and guitars are called right handed. The more intricate stuff is the left and that’s why my violin teacher refused to even consider giving me a supposedly left handed violin. I have an advantage.)

But it’s the bowing that makes me sound like a beginner even though I’m playing complex melodies and stuff that most beginners couldn’t. Not an absolute raw beginner but a beginner nonetheless.

I’m really inconsistent. One minute I sound great, then I pick up the violin and I can barely get any sound out at all. And no matter what I do. There is no way in hell I can ever get a sound out of the first three inches of the bottom of the bow, going upward. I cannot work this out.

And I can’t afford lessons. I am going to take the violin and bow to a repair shop though. And let them know I may only be able to afford one repair a month, but I need repaired or replaced whatever parts are not working. But I suspect the bowing problem is a technique thing. Because it works just fine going the other way.

Fuck. I don’t even remember how I learned this stuff. I mean yeah I need a lot of practice, but I worry if I practice it wrong all the time it may not do me many favors. And there are so many things I’m doing wrong with my bowing that I honestly don’t know where to start.

But I at least don’t sound like an angry cat. Although my playing makes Fey an angry cat. She never likes me playing music any more than she likes me singing or talking. And it’s usually specific to me. I don’t know WTF is up with her dislike of me making any sort of vaguely coherent noise. I got clawed in the leg several times today and also the arm.

She’s met the violin and bow though. Interested but cautious as all hell. Didn’t scent-mark them either the way she often does with stuff I show her. Probably too wary. She was very interested in the bow hair. Probably the rosin.

Which reminds me I read that one source of inconsistent bowing is not “starting” your rosin with sandpaper. I need to look into that. My rosin is definitely very hard after all this time. But I never knew about using sandpaper on it first. I really hope that will stop at least some of the ass-suckage, although I know technique is another part. I have to play harder than I should to get sound, and it whispers, though, so rosin’s probably part of it.

But I’ve also discovered I’m motivated in a way no other instrument has ever motivated me. And that’s partly because it’s violin but it’s also because it’s THIS violin and all its companions in the box that are all my friends, some of my oldest friends, and I want to do what they want. And I want them to sound good.

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