Last night the Fiddlefest was awesome and given that I kinda skipped this one with the excuse of not knowing enough songs for even 5 minutes yet... I figured why not add one more video here as my Fiddlefest offline bonus :))

Bob said
For someone playing just a month you are doing fantastic! I can't wait until you get your "real" violin and hear what you can do.

Keep up posting progress reports. 

Bob  

Thank you!  

It's actually been quite fun so far aside from the occasional frustration that we probably all experience from time to time... You know..  especially when you know you're doing something wrong and you have an idea on how to fix it, but you still end up not being able to do it in practice  

For example just in the past few hours I figured out where most of those unwanted noises are coming from (aside from the nylon bow that I have to rosin every 2 hours otherwise it doesn't grip lol )... Turns out I took the 'light bow grip' too seriously and I'm barely touching it with the tip of my index finger, which is okay when playing slow, but when doing fast crossings the bow is able to turn slightly making a sideways screech that gets mixed into the rest.. so I'm working on that atm..

Also with vibrato.. I got the motion down.. but my general hand placement is wrong (knuckles need to be higher), which is preventing me from doing a bigger range and also making me use more force than necessary... I tried and tried.. but the neck keeps sliding down to the base of my thumb instead of being 'on it' (notice how my thumb is way above the fingerboard). If I bring it up a bit and slightly squeeze to keep it in place my thumb literally dead-locks the entire vibrato motion (nothing would move unless the violin neck breaks lol).. Now I don't know if the thumb is supposed to slide on the neck slightly or roll or something so the best scenario is that it's due to the paint-job the violin has, which sticks to skin like rubber and once I get my real violin the problem will solve itself..  or if it's simply because I have too big hands.. or the violin neck isn't as thick as it's supposed to (I can reach the E string with my thumb while reaching the G string with my index finger - crossing one above the other) Here's my hand for reference haha: https://drive.google.com/open?.....mMwV0pvcVE

But anyway... I'll eventually sort them out somehow  

Other than that I'm really thankful for this forum and glad I registered.. everyone is super helpful and nice Makes learning that much more fun!

Tried this in a bit more relaxed state sitting down Seems like I need to practice 4th finger more often since that's what got me this time lol

Okay.. 

I removed the bridge again and thinned it out a bit more, since the A string wasn't loud enough... also dropped the G string just a slight bit more and it's slowly getting there.. it's still not too close to the fingerboard, but now I can pretty much play on the D string okay  

Now I'm just waiting for that bow, cuz this one keeps jumping around and making weird noises.. lol

Thanks for the input zpilot! I think Fiddlerman kinda lost track of all the stuff I've been posting so he didn't see that one lol

But so far it seems like you, me and spirryn all have this issue in common.. and the other thing we have in common is that all 3 of us played guitar before starting the violin... So maybe it IS just a 'bad' guitarist habit... I'll try to work on it more..

In the meantime here's another video for the archives... initially I didn't want to post it, but then I went back and checked out the one I did almost a month ago.. the difference is quite noticeable so I decided to add this to the long list of videos I've been spamming the forums with :)) It's getting less 'dying-cat'-ish each day.. 

There we go... after several attempts... this is the best I got..

Turns out it's much harder to play vibrato on camera than other stuff since the nervous shaking interacts with the vibrato making it really fast and bad It's usually way more even and less tense off-camera..