ELCBK said

 WHEN YOU GET TO WHERE YOU TO SHOW YOUR FACE WHILE PLAYING, WE'LL SHOWER YOU WITH YOUR 1st BADGE 🤗  

Like I said once before, if I had a thousand for a camera, I'd spend it on a bow!

The good news: -

today I took my Gewa with relatively new Dominants and my Breton with relatively new Zyexes and swapped them both over, aiming to brighten the Breton and tone down the Gewa.

The bad news: -

after I did it I realised I should have recorded them both, before and after.

Sorry!

The point is, I should have recorded the differences.

The Breton is a very warm violin and it sounds much better with Dominants because the Zyexes are among the warmest strings. I've just ordered some Thomastik Visions to put on at the end of July after orchestra season to take the use of bright strings on a warm violin one step further. The only reservation I have about the Dominants is their low tension. If the Visions are higher tension, maybe they will be revelatory.

Neither violin has settled yet. The Gewa will only ever be a backup instrument and will never sound great -it has sweet treble but weak bass (i.e. the G and D strings), whereas the Breton's bass is fabulous. If I ever buy an endoscope, I'll check how heavy the Gewa's bass bar is, not that it will be worth the expense of having it shaved down.

We have a gig towards the end of July, so it's back to the balancing act between a) graded material (ABRSM) for progress, but never performable unless I play a few grades down from what I'm working on, and orchestra for performance. The orchestra is playing difficult pieces (Suk Serenade, Parry English Suite, Strauss Metamorphosen, Boyce symphony no 2, Moszkowsky Prelude and Fugue op 85 and some dall'Abaco). The Strauss isn't difficult, but every violin part is unique and playing a solo fortissimo after 52 bars of rest is embarrassing if you play it in the wrong place. There is a septet version, which we may switch to).

Also our octogenarian conductor is retiring, so we have hired a new conductor for September - I hope he'll be briefed to do three gigs a year.

For bariolage, I had been doing the Vivaldi G Major (grade 5) and was planning to spend 2 months on the Handel D Major (grade 6) second movement (slower than Stern below - ABRSM recommend 100bpm, he's playing 120, I might aim for 90) before September, but the Handel isn't that much more difficult than the Vivaldi, and the bariolage extends down to the D string, so I may begin it now, but then I'll have a void to fill in the summer. Perhaps easier pieces with a view to performance. The Dulwich Symphony Orchestra publishes its pieces online for people to practise in the summer, but this September is too soon for me to consider joining them.

So I've made the formal decision to play ABRSM material for technique only, and practise orchestra pieces seriously. Perhaps that was obvious before, but it was only informal. There was hope of emulating my progress on the piano (go up a grade a year), but that isn't happening, as I haven't got a teacher to hold me in check, and I'm not sure where I should be held back to, and teachers aren't 100% reliable at doing that either.