The Evolution of the Electric Violin
The Violin World is changing. Can you feel it?
TV competition shows featuring electric violinists of all kinds are now commonplace all over the world. Online business stats are telling us the the Electric Violin Market is growing by as much as 13% per year!
We, at Outlaw Fiddle, feel that we are poised to be at the forefront of that new wave in violin history with our patented multiple magnetic pickup technology!
Why we are different. A quick technical history.
Nearly all available electric violins up to this point in history have been using the same piezo crystal technology. This tech has many diverse uses in industry from use as sensors in roads to tell the traffic signal when to change as you drive over them, all the way to musical instrument pickups like in acoustic guitars and violins.
Piezo's are simply pressure sensing devices that curiously produce a small electrical pulse when squeezed. These can work pretty well for stringed instruments... sort of... but also have the tendency, since they need to be squeezed to work, to end up sounding just that: kind of squeezed, squashed, nasal-y and "canned" and to even worse effect, can act to also pickup the rest of your band mates if loud enough, re-amplifying them through your speakers, creating a whole other set of problems.
In comparison to the guitar world, of which, for various reasons, violinists are about 80+ years behind of in tech development; a modern guitarist would never expect to plug their acoustic guitar into a stack of electric guitar amplifiers and turn it up to the proverbial "11!" The result, as you might guess would not be pleasant! The two types of guitars (electric and acoustic), common to most, are just two different things. Yet the violin world has been still trying to plug that "acoustic" into the electric amp and expecting it to sound good! In our opinion, it's time for the electric violin world to step up.
Just like an electric guitar can be played cleanly, with bell like tones, so can our Outlaw Fiddles, through any existing guitar amp on the market. The result is comparable. *Yes, the violin playing in the background of the short video above (except the awful sounding nose-plugged example) is all an EV3 through a favorite small tube amp. Clean, clear, beautiful and actually even more dynamic than piezo systems... yet they also, if desired, can rip roar on "high gain" settings through those same amps to compete with the electric guitars, all without sounding brittle, buzzy or generally irritating (just like the Blues band example at the very end of the same video above and in longer form, in the video below).
Magnets are the Magic
This has been accomplished through the use of magnets as the sensing device. The magnets do not actually touch the vibrating parts of the violin, but only hover near, so an element of "air" is added that piezo's miss, making them sound much more natural and surprisingly "acoustic" in their responsiveness, though not to sound like a Stradivarius, but something new. This newness was enough to be awarded a US Patent (#11,984,104) though this is not nearly as important to the inventor, a professional Jazz and Rock violinist himself, who started out just wanting this for himself after hearing it in a dream!.... yet, that's another story...
After a number of years of research and development, we now are offering the Outlaw Fiddle EV3 and new EVT models for modern violinists everywhere!
Click on the Products menu above to get more info on woods, finishes and pricing. Check out the Gallery for pics of past O.F's, and be sure to Contact us if you have questions, or would like to move forward with getting an instrument from our existing inventory, or having us custom build one to your specs. Hear the EV3 in action below.
