What I’m Lusting After: Luis and Clark Violin
This is what I’m lusting after right now. A Luis and Clark Carbon Fibre Violin.
Grrrrrr… 
At $5539 (or £3427) I’m saving up my pennies, and not holding hope for Santa to do the honours.
This sexy beast is made of a one-piece carbon fibre body and has gears in the pegbox. Save for the strings, it’s completely unaffected by heat, cold, sun, rain, snow, hail, no cracking, warping, peeling, woodworm or going out of tune at really inopportune moments.
You gotta love technology.
My current violin, of the plain old wooden variety, is lovely, and I do rather like it… but I struggle with the lack of ethics involved in its manufacture. The wood is over a hundred years old so I can pretty much cope with the lack of sustainable sourcing… but the glue is a hideous concoction of boiled down animal leftover bits. Ugh. Pretty grim.
The bow’s not much better. Most horsehair for bows is a slaughterhouse byproduct. The nylon fake stuff is pretty crud and sounds ropey. I do have an ‘Incredibow’ that’s completely synthetic though and it’s actually not all that bad considering the price, and I tend to chop and change between playing it and my normal wood bow.
You can also get ‘live’ horsehair. I’ve not tried it, but have been putting off rehairing my other bow for a few years now so saving up for that too…
The Incredibow is also much lighter and it’s soooo much easier on the right hand when I’ve got a touch of RSI from composing on the Mac for too long.
So if anyone’s feeling generous…
Get the Musical Mojo Back
My latest post for SCORECastOnline is up now: How to Get Your Mojo Back
This month’s theme on SCORECastOnline, the very cool site for film music composers, sound designers, and others in the same line of work, was Creativity, and more specifically the creative process.
There’s some fantastic posts on there on what was rather a tricky but fascinating concept to pin down.
I particularly enjoyed The Yin and Yang of the Creative Process, by Jim Well.
Jim eloquently describes the two diametrically opposed, but mutually dependent, traits of the media composer – the imaginative, creative formation of ideas followed by the realisation of those ideas through technical skills and practical processes.
Another incredibly insightful and useful post was A-List Film Composer Habits for Any-List Film Schedules.
This describes some of the thorough and detailed groundwork that goes on behind the scenes to enable the initial creative spark, such as the ‘Overture Blueprint’, research, ethnomusicology, limited instrument palettes and time-saving strategies. Very useful stuff.
And, as for mine, it was a pretty cathartic write.
Sometimes, creative burnout strikes… this is my experience of it, and more importantly, how to get out of the doldrums and back in the game. This is how to get your creative, musical mojo back.
A few questions that I’d like to pose to you…
It would be lovely to hear your thoughts either on these here comments below or over on the SCORECastOnline site. 
