Being much less cryptic [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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I borrowed a viol.

A double-bass looks a lot larger in my dining room than it did in it's owner's basement.

My fingers are sore, especially my right index (plucking) finger, but they'll toughen up.

Let's see how long it takes me to get the hang of using a bow.

Hmm. When I get tired and want to sit down ... it's hard to do that while playing a double-bass. OTOH, carrying a pair of guitars seems like less of a big deal now than it did before ...

(And yeah, viol. Like a gamba. The double-bass isn't a member of the violin family. But a bunch of you already knew that, right? Someone did make violins that large, but for some reason they didn't catch on.)

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There are 14 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

hey, i hadn't known that before now!

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The double-bass isn't a member of the violin family.

Oh? What is it, then?

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It's a member of the viol family, like the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and the viola da bracchia -- and a few others -- (but unlike the viola. All the other viols are considered non-modern instruments (obsolete, historical, or if you play them or listen to groups who do, merely "early") but the double-bass viol continued as a mainstream instrument. Apparently losing its frets somewhere along the way. (I'm not absolutely certain it ever had frets, but the instruments it's closest to have them.) So the largest mainstream member of the violin family is the violoncello (aka simply "cello").

And then there are other non-violin-family fiddles, such as the vielle, the crwth ... and some that I'd have to research to tell you whether they're obscure violins or merely similart-to-violins-but-not, like the nickelharpe and the hardanger fiddle.

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Wow, and my massive typo streak continues into a third day. *sigh* Missing right-paren, spurious 't' ... feh.

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I'm still unclear on the difference between viols and violins. Is it something in the way they are constructed? Something about it not having been made more modern? Perhaps the two are related.

Also, bassists in orchestras typically sit on, or at least rest against, a stool. If you don't have a stool, would it help to play it where you could lean against a wall a little bit?

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Yes, it's the way they're constructed. (To start with, notice that the violin, viola, and cello have round "shoulders", but the double bass has the same sloped shoulders as the viola da gamba.) Also, I think, the bowing technique.

Last night I did lean against a wall a bit.

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I'm told there's something important about proportional body dept and curve of the back of the instrument.

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you're contageous. That should be "depth".

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Wow.

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Yah.

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I'm confused, do you have a double bass or a bass viol? Either way, very cool, such lovely sounds from them though a bugger to hold and play I personally find. Yay for borrowing cool musical items - what does the cat make of such a huge thing in her house? :)

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Well, a bass viol would be what Felicia plays in The Homespun Ceilidh Band (http://www.homespunceilidh.com) -- she plays a bass viola da gamba, which is approximately the size of a cello (but, of course, famously lacks an endpin). This is the instrument commonly referred to simply as "double-bass"-with-the-double-bass-what-left-off. Aka "string bass", "doghouse bass", and "bass fiddle", and frequently abbreviated to merely "bass" when there's any confidence that doing so won't cause people to assume the speaker means a bass recorder, bass guitar, or bass clarinet, the "what" that it's the double-bass size of is viol. And fortunately it does have that endpin, which I need to extend a bit to make it the right height for me ... especially when I'm wearing heels.

[Tangent: Is there another instrument which calls the size larger than bass "double bass", or does everything else in a larger-than-bass size get called "great bass" (like recorders, which come in great-bass, extended-great-bass, and ... uh, I'll have to go hit the Kelisheck or Pietzold web sites to see what the don't-fit-in-some-houses sizes or recorder are called (SuperMario^H^H^HcroUltraBass recorder?)? The other instruments I can think of either don't get that large or call the next size "great bass", but I've got this nagging feeling I've forgotten something.]

So, um, it's the bowed instrument tuned the same as a bass guitar, that big thing in the modern orchestra. Heh. That big medieval thing that stands in the modern orchestra. ;-)

As for holding it, I'm sure I'm doing so incorrectly. I've got sloppy folk-guitar left-hand habits that include wrapping my thumb around the neck. When I catch myself doing that on the double bass, I remind myself to move my thumb to the back of the neck and then I notice that the instrument feels unstable ... which means ?I'd been holding it up with my left hand, which I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to do (I'll open one of the method books today and see what it says). I'm guessing that it should balance against my body in such a way that my left hand is free to fly about the fingerboard with no concern for supporting the instrument, but I haven't gotten that bit right yet.

And Perrine mostly thinks the bottom edge of the case smells interesting. It seems to be a tad loud & ominous for her when I play it, so far.

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Is there another instrument which calls the size larger than bass "double bass", or does everything else in a larger-than-bass size get called "great bass"? The other instruments I can think of either don't get that large or call the next size "great bass", but I've got this nagging feeling I've forgotten something.

Going from bass to double bass makes me think that there's a lost instrument in between. Doubling an instrument makes it an octave lower. Most instrument families go in half-octave sizes. With recorders (shawms, krumhorns, etc) you'll find alternating C and F instruments through the size range -- a very wide range for recorders. (You can also find G altos, but that doesn't break the pattern.) Violin/viola/'cello doesn't seem to work, until you learn that there used to be something midway between the viola and the 'cello -- the tenor violin.
The names I recall for large recorder sizes are bass (f), great bass (c), contra bass (F -- keep doubling size, we're past 6ft/2m now). Beyond that are the sub-contras, but I've never encountered one in the flesh. They'll be very, very big, very, very expensive, and very, very, very soft. (Unwieldy, inaudible, and expensive -- even by the standards of instruments -- no wonder we don't encounter them.)

So, um, it's the bowed instrument tuned the same as a bass guitar,

That was one of the things that clued me in to realizing that the bass was not quite-so-close kin to the violin/viola/'cello -- v/v/'c are tuned in 5ths, not 4ths. Viols and guitars are (mostly) tuned in 4ths. And the bass.

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Oooh. Drool.

You'll probably want to get a stool to use while playing.

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