Amplifying a violin for practice/live

[linear]

We've recently added a violin player to our merry band and we're looking into ways to get him playing through the PA and be heard without spending much cash. At the moment he's just playing into an SM58 and as expected it's difficult to get any sort of volume without feedback. The rest of us did resolve to play more quietly, but you know, drummers ...

Any thoughts?

[Dad3353]

If you're on a tight budget, you'll get a lot from a lavalier mic ('lapel' mic...), either wired or wireless (more expensive, of course...). Fix your price ceiling and see what's out there..? I've had excellent results (not violin, but brass...) with very modest ones. Worth a try; they can be cheap enough (starting at around £10...).
Just my tuppence-worth; hope this helps.

[Kirky]

[sub]I used to use a Shadow bridge pickup many years ago - looks like they still make them [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/shadow_violin_pickups.html"]http://www.thomann.de/gb/shadow_violin_pickups.html[/url][/sub]

[Beer of the Bass]

Some kind of piezo pickup (like the Shadow pickups linked above) will be a little less natural sounding but much more feedback resistant than a mic, and is probably the best option in a louder band with drums. They really need some sort of dedicated Piezo preamp or a good active DI box with input impedance of 1M ohm or higher, as straight into a line input or using the wrong DI box they can sound terrible!

[EliasMooseblaster]

The violinist in my old jazz band had a piezo fitted to the bridge of her violin. (May be worth getting this done professionally; I gather they're quite a bit easier to damage than the electric basses we chop and change so readily!)

I will second what BotB has already said though: get him some kind of acoustic preamp or good DI box. Our violinist used to plug her piezo output into a nifty little Fishman EQ which clipped to her belt. Essential for keeping the scratchy higher frequencies out of the PA!

[mixingwithtom]

Hi Linear,

I play violin and engineer for a large amount of my work, so have quite a bit of experience with this - feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected] with some more details

Beer of the Bass is spot on with his advice with a preamp for impedance matching, it's really important..I can make a few more specific suggestions suggestions (DB players may be familiar with what I use personally, which is an EDB1 - some gigs I use it for violin and some for electric bass!)

It does depend very much on how loud you play and the style/tone you need

Hope this helps, cheers

Tom

[wateroftyne]

Mrs. WoT uses a Pure Acoustic bridge pickup (http://www.pureacoustic.com/) into an LR Baggs venue DI. Can't fault it.

[JPJ]

We bought my daughter one of those 'cheap' Harley Benton electric violins from Thomann for Christmas. Despite the low price, it only took a half hours minor fettling to get it playing like her acoustic that was several hundreds more than the Harley Benton. Really authentic tone amplified too and looks pretty cool as its a skeleton body in white.

[pete.young]

I bought a second hand Carlo Giordano electric violin off eBay for about 45 quid and it has done the job admirably for our pogues tribute band with very loud drummer. It has a built in preamp we plug it straight into the desk.

[linear]

Thanks so much for all the replies. There are so may options it's a bit overwhelming especially when looking at piezo pickups, and we hadn't even considered electric violins, having assumed the cheap ones were garbage.

The Shadow NFX pickup looks like a reasonably safe bet, although it sits under the bridge and will presumably raise the strings a bit, and is maybe a bit too expensive. The option with a lavalier mic is tempting (as I could use a cheapish lavalier mic myself anyway), but it seems riskier when playing live.

I shall have a chat with the violin player this weekend and see. I think we need to set some sort of budget first, decide which options we can definitely rule out, and then see what we are left with.