Andy Chase

So after a few days of eying my fiddle from across the room, tentatively picking it up, making a few notes and putting it back down, I decided to try playing a couple of tunes by ear - ones that I’ve been playing on banjo and/or mandolin for at least a few years, and know like the back of my hand: Soldier’s Joy and Angeline the Baker

Well, duh… the simplest possible melodies of both of those tunes just fall right off the fingerboard, and can be played with just the sort of back-and-forth bowing you’d expect.

I sounded like hell, but being so familiar with the tunes, I didn’t have to search very much for the right notes… and even with my squeaky, off kilter playing, those simple quarter-note melodies sounded better than they ever do on Mandolin, which has no sustain to speak of.

Knowing a bunch of fiddle tunes before taking up the fiddle is probably going to be a big help.

Last week Jason tipped me off to an eBay seller offering a bunch of impossibly cheap violins; $25 for the instrument, bow, case, and a hunk of rosin. Against my better judgement, I broke down and ordered one; at $25, what is there to lose?

The instrument arrived yesterday, and for $25 I’m pretty impressed. No one will ever mistake it for a fine instrument, but I think it will actually be playable.

I spent a good chunk of time upgrading this site to Drupal 6 and giving it a nice clean theme over the holidays.

I lost some of the work I had done on this theme thanks to a sudden hard drive failure last week, and because I don’t feel like redoing that work right now or waiting until it’s redone before launching, I decided to just reenable anonymous content access and let people (and search engines) wander in. I have no doubt that numerous broken links and images may still be found among older posts, but a lot of cleanup has taken place there too. Not bad for 700+ posts dating back to 2001.