How to Play the Electric Violin

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am J-Adam Smith with Fiddle Team USA and Violin from the Heart, talking with Expert Village. I’m going to talk to you today about something that’s a passion of mine. I’m so excited to be able to talk to you about it. It’s about electric violins. Electric violins has been jumping on the market, there is something new that has never been. It’s new and improved and makes the violin even more versatile than it ever has been ever before. So you have got to be lucky audience to actually get to see me, of course, I am a performer J-Adam Smith, electric violinist. You’re going to be able to see me in kind of in action, working with everything. What I play on and what my instrument is, currently, you never know you might end up changing instrument in the future. But right now, what I’m playing on is a Yamaha. Yamaha, has got two ?? (045) microphones underneath the bridge, which gives it a professional level of electric violin or silent violin. That’s what I use. Now this is important, electric violin is so much different from the acoustic violin because it has no body to it. Ultimately, what does it is the vibration. You can do anything you want with the vibration. I will demonstrate what you can do with the instrument. Down here, if you look at my feet, you’ll notice that I have a control switch down here, so that I can actually change effects with my feet to whichever effects I want. Also, I have a volume or it can be used for a different kind of program functions. Demonstrating one of the styles I can do, I’ll show you. Now, that right there has a bass function to it. We actually brought it down to octave, and if you are familiar with violin, you will notice that an octave just means that it’s the same note but a lower note. So it’s making the violin sound like a cello or bass. Also, what you can do with the violin is that you can change the effect and see what this one is. Now, that one is interesting because it actually has an echo or delay to it and it allows my sound to continue, as if you are in a chamber or a dark tunnel. Again, it works a lot like electric guitars. A lot of the effects that you use for electric guitar can be used on the violin, so be creative out there. Try some different stuff, and blend things. Some effects have different effects blended into it to make it special. Now, let me see what else we got here. We have one, that I love a lot, which brings the violin into rock music. Lets see what I can do here. Ladies and gentlemen…electric violin, an amazing instrument, lots you can do, and I wish I had more time to share with you all the different effects, go out there and explore."