I went for my violin class yesterday and managed to try out a new violin and learned about how to pick violins suitable for myself. No plans to change violin though but there is a new violin for sale so I managed to try it. I can feel my current violin looking at me aggressively when I tried the other violin. Jealousy violin is a real thing hahaha. Or just violin mum guilt?

Anyway, it was a mellow sounding violin that was over 200 years old. Apparently her friend got it for her kids for $21,000. I think it should be in Singapore dollars. She is moving house and is selling it for $15,000 now. My teacher let me try it and see how I feel about it. I played the Beethoven Romance in F first movement for the first few bars and didn’t like how depressing it sounds. It makes me feel emotional too. Then I requested to try it again to play Schumann Fantasiestucke in first movement and it sounded better. I played the first few bars and I can still feel the depressed feeling from playing the violin. Then somewhere in the middle of the piece it felt better. However, the A string still sounded quite off to me. I still love my current violin which has a brighter sound and I don’t need to use too much power to play it. However, it is quite an experience to play a mellow sounding violin for the first time. Can really feel the emotions from playing the violin.

As it is my first time playing the violin, it felt quite unfamiliar to me. I gained back the familiar feeling from my violin after I resumed playing on my violin. It feels as if my violin has a sense of familiarity. She knows when I will panic in some parts of the pieces and it will try her best to help me get past the difficult passages in the music.

I don’t think I will change my violin but I do hope to get more involved in music performances in future. My violin is not being used as often as previously and it’s a sad thing.

My teacher told me a lot of professionals love to use mellow sounding violin as it gives character and can help to tone down the strength of the violin sound since the professionals usually play very strongly. My style is not that strong/loud so a brighter violin works well for me.