GregW said
Very creative and great playing.  I enjoyed listening to you!

  

Thanks, using a beech rod for making a bow was actually crazy back in summer 2015. Crazy seemed also the effect after staining and oiling it with almond oil: It hardened the beech quite a bit. Fairly elastic now. And makes my sound very different from usual bows. I feel like I mostly control that bow, but now and then it surprises me and these are the moments I more and more use to develop my style. Yes, daring crazy things and increasingly having fun doing it shaped the character of my last recording.

Don't worry, I use actually two USB sticks, so there's nothing in the trash which wouldn't be safe on two sticks already. The trash is just to start working right away, without looking for a stick in the first place.

I'm mainly typing books via OpenOffice, so I'm not afraid that anything may be degraded. I don't think the trash bin will change an E to an F for instance.

The laptop first let me work just in the "protected mode" which was even nastier because I had no WiFi and had to use the computers of the library. Getting into that protected mode really took like for ever -- switching on, re-start, re-start again.... But after weeks trying the program let me in without log-in. Each time it says like, "Sorry the log-in failed, you can work, but everything will be deleted."

I can now work and it works okay.

I think it's damage to the setup -- just a software issue. Life without computers would be better, but I couldn't type and print thousands of pages. Making books via handwriting would be insane .... all that correcting and writing again and again ....

But I hear your warning: If I make a new recording of my playing I will not edit the copy in the trash, but get a copy from a stick. Degraded sound quality is really not what I want.

Thanks!

bocaholly said
@demoiselle, are you using a toothpick strung up with dental floss?

Seriously, I think violin bows weigh in around 60 grams... really light ones maybe 10 gr. less than that. 24 grams... that's amazing. What is the stick made of?

  

Fiddlerman said
Maybe your kitchen scale is defective. Seems crazy light as you wrote. Personally I need more weight in a bow to feel that I can play with no pressure and still produce a good solid soft sound.

  

Brand-new digital kitchen scale. No, my bow is really extremely light. If I compare modern baroque bows to original paintings from the 1600s and early 1700s I get the impression, those original bows from back then where very much lighter. Besides people today are too lazy to use a clip-in bow, but it is the clamping mechanism of the modern bow which makes is so heavy. Medieval violin bows look even lighter than my one does: they look thin like twigs and it seems they used even less hair. I use between 30 and 40 hairs for a rehairing. In Constantinople they had a rule for court musicians to use under 30 hairs. I think it was 24 hairs. The romantic period is not the kind of sound model I want to follow. I want the opposite of what people consider classical music norm. I want to be far from that normality. There's entirely too much standardization these days.

Today I threw my frog on the kitchen scale: It weighs 2 gr / 0.05 oz. I made it out of an oak strip and oak is relatively heavy. But it really feels like a 5 cent piece in my hand. It is thinner than a modern frog and has no metal parts of course. The rod of my bow is a bit shorter than the shortest 1600s bows offered by an Austrian bow maker. I made it out of a beech rod. But the beech somehow changed: the staining and oiling with almond oil made it harder. It feels very different from untreated beech rods, very peculiar that. I stained it several times an then the oil hardened more than usually. Looks like a lucky accident, without knowing what I did in summer 2015. Beech is no good material for bow making at all. But though my bow got okays from a luthier and my teacher in 2017.

Oh, by the way: I joined the Berliner outdoor folk session last Friday, with violin and guitar. Tomorrow I'll go there again ....

It was weeks ago but actually I'm very happy with this way too slow Gavotte. I played it that slow because I couldn't do it faster on guitar.

Tenor recorder with subject, violin adds improvised second voice -- that's how I want it. That could be the Sound oft my Future Band......

Sounds now like Kind of air.   

I'm still practizing to this guitar Background. I love to habe a guitar in the Background!

Mark said
Demoiselle,

Sounds good, the sound of the tenor recorder still amazes me at how good it sounds. It sounded nothing like that when I tried years ago to play one.

Thanks for posting,

Mark

  

I have been infected by certain CDs with recorder suites and sonatas since the very early 2000s. Especially I listened to this one over and over again.