Gayle's Dope

Tuesday we took off for Chilliwack to look at electric violins. We went to a little shop run out of the home of a gentleman who repairs violins and sells primarily to fiddle teachers. We brought home a beautiful full size standard violin and have been enjoying every minute playing with this new instrument. Daunting? Nah. We've named this charming being Gayle partially because of the genderlessness of the name, which suits the violin, and partially in honour of Gayle Young, a mythical musician in the eyes of Agent Q. Gayle Young created a couple of original instruments back in the early 80s - one called the Amaranth which is a sort of giant violin neck with multiple strings and sort of looks like a stringed casket. The other is a Columbine, which is a xylophone in principle but is constructed from pipe and is bowed on the cut ends. They both have original musical notation and scales. Gayle also plays the violin as far as I can recall.

Our violin peg was slipping just a couple hours after we got it home. But we pushed the tuning peg in a little further and it's been firm. However, I bought some peg dope to help the peg grip in place. We're excited about the sounds this instrument makes and are a little surprised at how easy it is to noodle around and have fun. Everyone says that it's near impossible to even get a sound out of a violin, other than a screetch - but that's not the case. It's an instrument that wants to sound good.

Our friend wants an accordion but her mom says she can't ask for an instrument until she reads a story by James Joyce called A Little Cloud, which is, as her mom described, the story of a wannabe writer. I guess the idea is that after reading the brilliant Joyce one would think twice about being pretentious enough to attempt to play a musical instrument of one's desire, and by relenting, save their family hundreds of dollars in music lessons. Good economy there in Joyce! This mom says people just like to look good posing with things like violins but they have no intention of playing or learning. This mom owns a lotta books. So today we're taking our friend to look at accordions so that she can buy one and come over and play at our house.

Well, Agent Q and I have a number of pieces to record now. We'll have it up on our podcast site in a little while.