Waste of time?

Sorry for the lack of posts here in the past few days. I’ve been wasting my time with new toys instead of blogging.

What toys? Well, I’ve bought myself a new electric fiddle from eBay. Not one of the gorgeous but expensive Bridge fiddles that I’ve been lusting after for a while now. Instead of spending £1000 or so on something I couldn’t be sure I’d like long term, I’ve opted to spend £63 (including postage!) on something that will let me get started. OK, it’s not exactly pretty and, OK, it doesn’t sound anything like as nice as the Bridge, but for this price I can’t really complain :-)

Of course, an electric instrument isn’t much use by itself so I’ve also added an M-Audio Black Box – a combined amp modeller / effects box / drum machine / USB recording interface that Tom pointed me at. They’re going quite cheap at the moment (I got mine for £99 from SoundControl but they seem to have sold out online now) but are very good value for money. So, for less than £165, I’ve got myself a starter electric fiddle / effects / recording setup. Which is nice :-) It looks like this:

The fiddle actually looks a little nicer than that makes it look – the paint isn’t flat red but is a bit sparkly. However, the strings on it are horrible!

The basic, unaltered fiddle sounds like this (75 kB mp3) but adding a bit of reverb and chorus to it mellows it somewhat (145 kB mp3). Of course, being electric means that I can do funky (150 kB mp3) and strange (300 kB mp3) things. OK, so the playing’s not that great on those tracks – I’ll try and get a better recording! Those are my first attempts; the provided software is powerful but doesn’t always work the way I expect.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 6:52pm on 03 April 2006
Category: Computers, Life, Music, Struggling, General