Violinists are sensitive about this.<\/p>\n Violinists don’t like<\/strong><\/span> playing second fiddle. \u00a0\u00a0They ask for “more violin” in the monitor mix and the house mix.\u00a0 (The “monitor mix” is what the band hears on stage. \u00a0The “house mix” is what the audience hears.)<\/p>\n Truce time . . .<\/p>\n Let’s just forget about mikes. You don’t see them at New Orleans parades.\u00a0 You don’t see them at bluegrass jam sessions. \u00a0Ban mikes.\u00a0 Let lungs rule.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup’s <\/strong>keyboard player,<\/span><\/span> Alan Douglass, likes to get to concerts early to talk about mikes with the sound mixologists. \u00a0Alan is Yiddishe Cup’s spokesman to the sound guys; if I would let the other band members chime in, we would spend the entire sound check saying, “more clarinet,” “more violin” and “more vocal.”\u00a0 Every musician has a focus — himself.<\/p>\n Before Yiddishe Cup goes on stage, the sound guys — for no apparent reason — spin all the dreidels on the mixing board, and we sound like soup.<\/p>\n Throw away the mikes, musicians.\u00a0 If you can’t hear yourself, so what? You shouldn’t have taken up violin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Klezmer violinists often don’t get along with klezmer clarinetists. The animosity goes back to the late Chagall era. In the early 1900s, recording engineers favored the piercing clarinet over the murky violin.\u00a0 Studios had big acoustic horns the musicians played into.\u00a0 The clarinet’s sound picked up better than the violin’s.\u00a0 The clarinet’s ascendancy was quick, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klezmer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3271"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8694,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271\/revisions\/8694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"violin\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/violin-225x300.jpg\" "\\"violin\\"")
In the early 1900s, recording engineers favored the piercing clarinet over the murky violin.\u00a0 Studios had big acoustic horns the musicians played into.\u00a0 The clarinet’s sound picked up better than the violin’s.\u00a0 The clarinet’s ascendancy was quick, and the violin became pass\u00e9 and alter heym<\/em> (old country).<\/p>\n![\"moish1\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/moish1-186x300.jpg\" "\\"moish1\\"")
I tell the sound techs, “<\/em>Can you turn my moish <\/em>up?”\u00a0 (I like moish<\/em> better than mike<\/em>.\u00a0 As for mic<\/em>, that is totally absurd.\u00a0 Fiction alert.)<\/p>\n