I have never really tried playing violin solo, or recording solo. Making music by myself seemed far beyond me. I enjoy playing with others and adding texture to their music, so I didn’t have any real reason to even attempt to make my own stuff.
I currently play with a band full of absolutely crazy talented musicians. They have huge vision and goals. They do not however put the work needed into making these goals happen. After three years, and half way through finally recording our first full length album (a year late mind you), they decided “Hey! Lets change our sound completely!! Lets change from folk to experimental atmospheric type stuff!!” /facepalm. Not that I have a problem with that style (other than the fact that violin doesn’t have much place in it), but people loved our sound and were anxious to get their hands on a full cd. Why in the world would you change the sound you are great at?!? Our lack of success hasn’t had anything to do with our sound, but our inability to focus, work hard and get stuff completed. I finally get that moving forward is not something this group does. We take one step forward and three back. We set goals then wave awkwardly as we watch the deadlines for those goals come and go.
Now don’t take all this complaining the wrong way. I love playing with my band. I just had to come to a few realizations. I think for far too long I looked at this band as a serious project instead of just having fun with it. I really did expect this group to succeed. This is where my frustration was coming from. While a couple of other members claim that their goal in life is to see this band be successful, it would take an insane amount of effort that no one is willing to put in. I grew up playing in the Claremont Youth Symphony Orchestra, then in the Claremont Symphony Orchestra as an adult. We practiced once a week and had a couple of concerts a year. While there were professional musicians in the Orchestra, it was not a group attempting to be a professional Orchestra (although they sounded like it, they are full of amazing conductors and musicians). It was all for fun. This is exactly what Stereo Child has turned into. We practice once a week (well that is the goal anyway, that doesn’t always happen either), and we play maybe two shows a year.
The problem with this is that I need more music for my time lapse painting videos. I have an instrumental project I am going to be working on with someone this summer, but I need songs now. It finally dawned on me that there was no reason I couldn’t do this myself. I don’t need professional quality recordings for my videos, just pretty sounds playing in the background. I made my first attempt of all violin music this past week. It really is just me playing improv, then recording a second track over that, also improv. I’m still working on figuring out how to use the audio software. I can’t figure out how to record then record over a few measures without starting from scratch when I miss a note, so improv is really the best I can do at the moment. The point is, I made noises for my videos all by myself! I’m so excited about this. Once I figure out how to work this stuff I can attempt a planned out song. My eventual goal is to have a full CD of me on violin 
Right now I can only record on my electric as I don’t have the mics to record my acoustic, but its a start!
Anyway, after that really long explaination, here is the first of what I hope to be many recordings of myself on violin.
I have yet to figure out how to add audio by itself into the blog, so here is a recent painting with my recording in the background 
A few days into the lovely cold/flu thing I was up on the counter looking for cough drops. When I hopped off I landed wrong and sprained my ankle. The lovely part about this is because my fibro was already flared up from everything else, this felt SO much worse than it actually was. I was certain it was broken, and it really isn’t even that bad of a sprain. REALLY FEBRUARY?!?! REALLY!? God must be trying to tell me just to stay in bed for an entire month…because that’s what ended up happening. Well bed and playing way too much warcraft. I now have a geared 85 lock to add to my collection instead of new paintings /sigh.
