Hey, all. I’m still basking in the glory of having sent the rough draft of Light’s End, my new alien invasion novel, to my editor. It was 112k words of fun, trust me. I think I started writing on it this past late summer, and it took some doing.

So, to celebrate, I’ve been catching up with violin work and manual labor over on the Hell Tree, previously mentioned in the posts below.

Guys, I’ve been really impressed with the 57 fiddles, named “57” because that’s how many dollars each one cost me. Please see the review post below for the full story. I’m still shaking my head at the scandal of it; fifty-seven dollars for a violin body of this quality. It’s ridiculous. Above, you can see the one I’ve decided to keep as a vacation/camping fiddle. It outshines my current camping violin, which I’ll sell to make room for this one.

I added some extras to the one I kept for personal use, including a fancy chinrest and Pirastro Tonica strings. A brief aside about the Tonicas: I’ve used many types of strings over the years, including D’Addarios, Red Labels, Infelds, Dominants, Fiddlerman, etc. For some reason, I’ve never used the Tonicas, but several months back, Fiddlershop.com had a sale; a set of Tonicas plus a good rosin cake for about 25 bucks. I couldn’t pass it up, so I bought the set. The strings sat until I had a good candidate, and I decided to use them on this 57 fiddle.

They are great! I love the feel and the sound; they’re worth every cent of 38 bucks, the going price for a set. One could make the argument that putting a mid-grade string on a low-end violin is like throwing lipstick on a pig, but I disagree. If the strings help this humble fiddle to sound its best, then so be it.

Because working together, they play very well!

I thought to share this project with you, because it’s turned out much better than I anticipated.