Gordon Shumway said
Currently happy. Although I thought Oct 18th was my 5th anniversary of violin playing, as my first violin lesson was 18/10/18, but now I find I bought a book on shifting in July 2018 from Amazon, so I'm now guessing I began on about my 58th birthday, which means my 5th anniversary has been and gone.

...

Rosin = Guillaume for a long time.... 

There's a new rosin thread on VCom, but I don't want to add to it too much too soon.

My own experience is that I needed almost 5 years of violin playing before I could predict what tone I'd get from my violin before picking it up each day. Until then, like many other beginners, my tone varied from day to day, beyond my control, and I was trying different strings and different rosins. But it really is the case that, after you do a basic match of strings to violin*, your right arm is 90% responsible for the tone you create, and your vibrato for 9%. Bow and rosin contribute 1% or less between them.

*Currently my strings are still: -

G and D = Vision

A = Vision Solo (because the open Vision A sounded feeble, but that may have been my fault)

E = Prim. All bright because my violin is warm. I have Evah Pirazzis and I will try Warchal Brilliants, but unfortunately I still have a set of Tonicas and a set of Dominants to use up.

Climates are difficult - I get the impression that in the USA everyone has Aircon, in which case the climate is irrelevant.

If you do have extremes of hot/humid and cold/dry, then stick to Hill light and dark, but until you've learnt how to use your right arm, "stick" is the operative word. You'll change from day to day, so changing rosin from day to day is just too many changing variables. You'll be the problem, not your gear, until you've reached a certain standard.

Matching bright strings to a warm violin or warm strings to a bright violin and any light rosin to a hot humid climate and any dark rosin to a cold dry climate should be the basic match. Then after that all the fine tuning lies with you. You won't become Itzhak Perlman by finding exactly the right string/rosin combo.

Yes, in the UK, the climate is moderate in almost every way, so a moderate rosin like Guillaume works. I don't find it creates much dust.

My Evah Pirazzis are in a green packet.

I never really intended it as a blog to which no-one else contributes. Questions and answers are valuable to all of us.

Three weeks on a hard, narrow campbed at the folks' place have resulted in a pinched nerve in my left shoulder. It doesn't actually hurt (more than usual) when I play the violin, but I do get bad pins and needles in my left fingers when our orchestra plays a gig and I don't get a rest. That's probably due to practice involving constant stopping and starting, so that stamina doesn't get built up. But, with an eye on the anatomy websites, examining the shoulders for veins and arteries and nerves (if you've had an angiogram or -plasty, you'll know the sensation of the motion inside the artery in your right shoulder), I'm looking for a simple, comfortable sponge shoulder rest. Sainsbury's Basics scourers are the right thickness. Three glued together side by side with a gelpad to attach them to the violin might work. (car sponges and rubber bands are too cumbersome and not sure to be safe for the violin)

Unfortunately that teacher is fully booked, but they've got another one 0.8 miles from me.

Since orchestra is now over for Christmas I swapped my strings. After 18 months of Visions (but Vision Solo A and Prim E, I think it was), I put on a full set of Evah Pirazzis. I don't think I like them as much as the Visions.

I am often to be heard complaining that there is no comfortable combination of chin and shoulder rest.

My first chinrest was the usual Guarneri, as with 99% of beginners.

I didn't like it. I bought a Hill Guarneri. Didn't like it.

A new violin came with a Teka which was comfortable for a while, but then I replaced it with an ultra-high Teka because I wanted the violin closer to my shoulder.

Then I bought a Berber, which was OK for a while.

Now I am using the Hill Guarneri again and I like it a lot, as it's the one that extends farthest to the left, and I can't play the bass strings unless I am over the top of them.

Sheesh!

(the shoulder rest is a Wolf Secondo, before you ask. I hadn't been enjoying that either, but it's ok with the Hill)

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Incidentally, some of you may have noticed that all my chinrests are centre-mounted. This is deliberate - resonance patterns reveal nodes in the centre, so in theory a centre-mounted chinrest will have least effect on the top's resonance.

However, the people who measure these patterns seem to have done it with tops not glued to the sides of the violin, as once glued the resonance pattern must have a node all around the top.