Hey Matt, I saw Pierre Blanchard with the Django Festival Allstars last night. My god, what a show! Blanchard had such an incredible tone. I just loved his amplified sound. Some combination of a pickup and overhead mic combined with a small stage amp and, (of course, a lifetime of experience and huge heart at his fingertips ) but do happen to know what his stage set up is?

Everyone has got one. I'd love to hear yours. The time that you either felt fully out of your depth, someone acted in a way that ruined the vibe or you just didnt know the chords and had to play a solo. Here's mine... I was running a jam in an unnamed major city in the north. No one turned up to jam for the first set, but the room was packed. In the break, a huge dude came up to me and aggressively said, “I’m a singer. I don’t know any tunes and I don’t sing jazz, but this is meant to be a jam so I’m gonna get up and sing what I feel, OK?!” I said, “OK.” We started the first set and played a minor blues. Halfway through the tune the man stood up from his seat in the audience, slowly got up on stage, and started improvising some random stuff on top. I thought it would be a complete car crash, but it actually didn’t turn out too bad. He got a massive round of applause and looked happy. Then he just sat back down in the audience after his solo. It wasn’t great by any standards, but it wasn’t a total nightmare. I was relieved. Just as the next break was coming up, I spotted a local-ish singer known to be a total nightmare. Shouts at her musicians onstage, gets lost and blames the band, extremely difficult person. A great singer but such a difficult presence that she’d been given a nickname (which I obviously can’t share here). My heart sank again when I saw her. She asked to sing in the break and I of course said, “Yes.” She sang Summertime. It was ok, actually pretty good. But halfway through her first round of the melody, the guy stood up again. He crashed onstage this time and tried to find a mic that was on. The only spare mic wasn’t on, so he shouted at the sound engineer until he turned it on. What followed can only be described as a vocal battle. Two singers, with very different levels of skill, basically shouting at each other in A minor. Like two walruses fighting over a rock in the ocean. It was both amazing and terrible at the same time. And it’s both my best and worst jam session story, can you top it?

Hi all, There are two main streams into jazz violin: Classical and Folk. I’ve spoken a bit about how you can use your classical mindset to excel in jazz, but I wanted to see if anyone wants to weigh in on what folk music can bring to the table in terms of transferable skills for jazz. I find that learning folk music is extremely beneficial, as it’s often about learning tunes and focusing on style and small musical intricacies. The way I learn a folk melody is similar to how I approach a transcription, looking at the small details and trying to replicate them. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Something a few have chatted about in here, as well as hearing this lots during my time teaching, is people want to further their finger dexterity and get better technique. I hear this, I’ve had this issue myself over the years. I would always recommend finding an in-person teacher for this, but someone who gets what you are after. As well as finding a teacher it’s worth making sure that the material that you work on when thinking about your technique is going to further your jazz playing. That’s why I put together this new section in the classroom dedicated to all of the warm ups and enclosure exercises that I use on a daily basis. They sort of follow this recipe: Enclosure or chromatic idea + Scale + Arpeggio. To get access to a new one of these every week, sign up to one of the paid tiers of membership here. You will get a video of me playing the exercise, the enclosure that it contains and a transcription of both of these. The video here is a short sample of one of these, in the classroom you will get the sheet music plus the recording in a few different keys too.

Over the years I’ve gone through a lot of different stages in my amplification journey as a jazz violinist. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t amplify the violin at all. We spend so much time practising to get our sound from the instrument itself, and when we practise, we’re not plugged in. So it can feel weird when we have to amplify, like it’s not quite the sound we’re used to. I went through a phase of always using a microphone, trying to find a way to get the most natural sound possible. But as we all know, you just end up feeding back all the time and struggling to play. It only really works in the right setting. Nowadays, when I do a gig where a microphone is going to work well, like a concert with a sound engineer and a decent PA, they usually have something for me anyway, like a DPA or a live condenser mic on a stand in front of me. If I’m not in that kind of setting, I use my pickup instead. I set it so the amp is just a bit quieter than my acoustic sound. That way I can still play how I play, without having to change my bow pressure to suit the pickup sound. If I’m in a really loud environment, with a loud drummer, a big band, or playing background in a busy bar, I just embrace the pickup sound and turn it up. I’ve spent a long time working on playing in these situations, practising at home using less bow and getting used to that sound and feel. With that said, these are the current products that I have: - Schertler Stat V - Thomann Violin Microphone What’s your current setup?