Geezer, Meet the Violin.

©2018 by John LaTorre

©2018 by John LaTorre

Those who claim to know will tell you that if you want to learn to play the violin, you have to start early. In fact, some say that if a child is going to amount to anything as a performer, the lessons should begin before the child turns twelve, or even earlier. So what chance does a man have if he takes it up at the age of seventy? That’s what I wanted to find out.

There are reasons why an early start is an advantage. For one thing, the violin is among the most unaccommodating instruments around. It requires you to hold it firmly between your chin and your shoulder, in a position that scoffs at ergonomics. To facilitate this action, there are a variety of attachments, called “chin rests” and “shoulder rests,” that you can buy, in an abundance of shapes and dimensions. You, the aspiring student, can be expected to go through any number of conceivable combinations of these articles before hitting on a configuration that’s half-way comfortable enough for you to proceed with the lessons. And even then, you’ll find that you’re using neck muscles you never realized you had.

Then you have to bend your left hand into an awkward arc, the better to position your fingers on the fingerboard, while keeping your left elbow close to the body. If that wasn’t enough, it also requires you to hold the bow in a grasp that you’ll never use when grasping any other object you’ve ever encountered. The resulting contortions are quite unnatural, so the earlier that a child can learn how shape his or her body to the demands of the instrument, the better chance that the posture will eventually become natural enough to permit further learning. The instrument’s design is over four hundred years old, after all, and it’s not about to change to conform to your needs. It’s up to you to make the adjustments.

Having mastered all that, you’re ready to play. But you’ll soon discover that when you touch the bow to the strings, all sorts of tones can be produced, most of them undesirable, depending on where the bow is touching the string and how much force is being applied. Too little, and you’ll generate a vile scratching sound; too much and your note will be a coarse rasp. And did I mention that the tension of the bow’s hairs is critical to its sound? That tension is dialed in with a little screw on the bow’s handle, and the bow hair must be slackened each time the bow is stored, and tightened every time you take it out to play, so you can’t just find the right tension and leave it that way. You also have to make sure you have the proper amount of rosin on the bow hair, to provide the exact amount of stickiness it needs to grasp and vibrate the violin strings.

And then there’s the fingerboard itself. There are no frets on it, which means that if you want to play a note in the proper pitch, your finger must press on the string in precisely the right place for that pitch, and not a fraction of a millimeter off in either direction. You have only your ears to tell you whether you’re in tune or not, which means that your sense of pitch has to be trained as well. (Note that we’re talking about relative pitch here – the relationships that the notes have to each other, and not with reference to the standard or “perfect” pitch you might produce with a tuning fork.) By contrast, most stringed instruments are fretted, with the vibrating length of the string determined by about two dozen metal bands that are placed along the fingerboard. By pressing the string pretty much anywhere above these frets, you can get the string to vibrate at the proper pitch. But the violin (along with the viola, cello, and double bass, its cousins in the orchestra) doesn’t use frets, so your finger position must be precise.

And, finally, you must acquire the necessary coordination to ensure that the bow is hitting the string at the exact time that your finger is in position, and that the bow is at the right location on the string and at the right pressure. It’s like walking backward while patting your head with your left hand and rubbing your belly with your right one, all the while whistling “Dixie” in tune.

After my first lessons on the violin, by the gifted teacher Linda Keen, my respect for violinists increased by a couple orders of magnitude. It became obvious to me that starting at the age of nine wouldn’t have been such a bad idea, after all. But I persevered, first learning how to control the bow on the “open” strings, which are not touched by your fingers, and then using the fingers to sound the five or six basic notes on each string. After six months, that’s pretty much where I am now, although I am able to play a few simple pieces of music with enough proficiency that my cats no longer leave the room when I pick up the violin. But I’m still a long, long way from being comfortable playing for and with other people.

I have to credit Linda with something else, too. I am learning the violin “left-handed” and she was one of the very, very few teachers in my area that were willing to teach me. Some explanation is in order here.

Playing the violin left-handed is, as you might suspect, the mirror image of playing right-handed. You hold the bow in the left hand and press on the strings with the fingers of the right hand. The stringing on the violin itself is also reversed, which in turn means that the reinforcements on the inside of the violin must also be reversed if you want the best sound from the instrument.

Now, I play the guitar and mandolin right-handed, so why didn’t I do the same with the violin? The answer is: I tried. My kit-built violin was a right-handed violin, but when I tried to play it, my left wrist hurt. It didn’t want to bend in that awkward arc I mentioned a few paragraphs back, and extending my fingers to press on the strings resulted in more wrist pain than I was willing to accept. But when I switched the violin from my left shoulder to my right shoulder, and experimented with using my right hand on the fingerboard, all was well. So I went back to my workshop, opened up the violin, and reversed the bracing on the inside of the spruce soundboard. After the violin was reassembled, I made a new bridge and nut that were mirror images of the old ones, installed the sound-post (a sort of internal strut) on the opposite side of where it was before, and strung up the violin again. A little playing with the new configuration told me that I needed to reverse the positions of the tuning pegs as well, so that their locations wouldn’t interfere with my right hand’s range of motion.

I didn’t realize that I had just created one of the rarest of stringed instruments. I showed it to a few friends, some of whom were luthiers, and found to my surprise that none of them had ever seen a left-handed violin before. It turns out that there was a deep-seated prejudice against these things in the violin world. Some of the reasons made sense, in a way. For instance, if you had three violins in a row in the often cramped confines of a symphony orchestra, you’d want them all to be sawing away in the same direction, so that they wouldn’t be poking each other with their bows. There was also the feeling that the symmetry of the players made for better visuals as well. At any rate, students were discouraged from learning on anything but a right-handed violin, and teachers would usually refuse to accept any students who wanted to learn to play left-handed. Not to mention that the overwhelming majority of violins were right-handed, including all the prestigious ones sought after by talented violinists. (If Stradivari or any of the other famous violin makers of Cremona had ever built a left-handed violin, history has failed to record the event.)

But I didn’t fit into either of those categories. I already had a left-handed violin and didn’t expect to trade up to a better one any time soon. And I didn’t see myself ever performing in a symphony orchestra. Nonetheless, I had made contact with a half-dozen instructors who turned me down before Linda agreed to undertake the challenge.

A few weeks ago, I did something else that would have scandalized more than a few violinists and teachers. I thought about putting frets on the violin, to eliminate much of the difficulty of positioning my fingers in the right place. After all, I’d been used to playing guitars pretty much all my life, and I missed not having them on the violin.

I found, though, that fretted violins were regarded with the same distaste as left-handed violins, or possibly even more so. Reasons abounded. For one thing, you couldn’t “slide” a note to deliberately make it off-pitch, which is an important part of the repertoire of the classical violinist as well as popular fiddling styles as old-time music, bluegrass, and Celtic styles. There were also a variety of musical traditions that used a somewhat different scale, with different assignments of pitch; these included mid-Eastern traditions, “Gypsy” music, and Far Eastern music. To put frets on a violin would destroy its versatility in accommodating all these styles.

“Well,” I thought, “so what?” I wasn’t going to be playing any of these sorts of music for a long time, if at all. And if I did want to, later on, I could just switch out a fretted fingerboard with an unfretted one. Researching further, I found that there was a small but vocal group of fiddlers who had good things to say about fretted fiddles. Some were in rock bands, where the playback levels of the venue prevented them from hearing their own music clearly. Since they couldn’t always hear how accurately they were fingering the strings, they came to rely on frets to ensure that they were hitting the right pitches. I also found that there were luthiers who, for around $150.00, would be glad to sell you a fingerboard with frets already installed. That was a bit out of my price range, but I wondered how hard it would be to install the frets myself. The only drawback was that they had to be precisely placed if the violin was to play in tune.

And then I found that I didn’t have to make my own “fretboard,” because Peter Stoney, a musician in Canada, had devised a way to make an overlay to a fingerboard that had the frets already installed. The overlay was a sheet of thin plastic that adhered to the fingerboard, and he would sell you two of them for $28.00, postage paid. Mr. Stoney makes them for violins, violas, and cellos and sells them through his business (the web site is www.frettedfiddle.com) and on eBay. I couldn’t resist, and placed my order. A week or so, later, they came in the mail, and I put one of the pair onto my violin and tried it out.

Well, it works. The frets are in the right place, as far as I can tell, and they don’t interfere with the movement of the strings, although I did have to raise one of the strings a hair to avoid it buzzing against the fret. (I’d set that string too low when I built the violin.) They don’t quite work the way frets usually do on a guitar, because your finger has to be pretty much on top of the fret or just behind it, but I don’t consider that a problem. They do let you know by feel, before your bow touches the string, whether your finger is in the right place or not. And I can foresee that they will help me place my fingers properly over time, so that the overlay won’t always be necessary in the future. In this sense, the frets like the set of training wheels on a bicycle: as you continue to practice, the less need you’ll have for them over time, and the earlier you can get to that level of proficiency. After all, with all the complexity of the other things that a seventy-year old man has to master, he needs all the help he can get.