I see you tremble with antici...

Very, very slowly I am putting my GOT cover together. Last night I stayed after work and played my very first tremolo violin part (on my good violin). And it was up in fifth position, too. So I set up the mic and the click track and played six times, panned the takes slightly and bounced them to a new stereo track.

That's the string trick I mean to be doing a lot of down the road. Especially in the next piece in my list; a "crime jazz" cover of Miracle of Sound's "Ballad of Commander Shepard." Strings -- especially violins -- when played solo can be harsh, strident. There's some funny acoustics going on having to do with smearing the peaks of the higher harmonics of that triangle waveform so when you mass strings in larger groups they take on a softer, shimmering sound.

Especially for tremolo. This was bow tremolo, and I'm glad I read up first. You use just a bit of bow near the tip and do up-and-down strokes very quickly. Use mostly the hand, and it is totally permissible to take your pinkie off but this is considered a good test of whether you have a proper bow grip; a big part of the motion comes from not the wrist but flexing the fingers sideways like a spider crawling across a table.

Tremolo can be done free but is usually done in a multiple of the beat. When you mass the strings, that rhythm is still there but each of the violins/takes will be slightly ahead in places, slightly behind in places, and it smears the attack transients to make a softer affect.

Even if I am playing up very high on that steel (actually, mine is aluminium-clad) A string.

And I can't help thinking that the triangular form of the string in that stick-slip Helmholtz vibration is responsible for the triangle wave and that distinct mix of harmonics that makes the violin sound recognizable.

***

In unrelated news, I discovered that there is a movie theater in Paris -- apparently, the only one in Europe, too -- that does a regular midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So that's one good thing I found in my latest Paris book (a book I found in a discard pile while walking to work).