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Mullerhead Productions
The Electric Violin!
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Picture of my electric violin!
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 I've been playing with the Band of Humans now for 7 years And now play with the JP Jones and Rite Tite band as well. I love gigging out. Right now it's my favorite thing to do.
For the first 2 years I played an acoustic fiddle with a Fishman pickup wedged into the bridge on an acoustic instrument. It produced a very accurate and full sound. However, two problems became apparent. One, the signal output was not strong enough and I fried my amplifier, pushing it to do more work than it was really capable of handling. Two, at bigger gigs where we were outside or in large halls, I could not keep up volume-wise with out major amounts of feed-back (oh so irritating). I decided it was time for an electric violin.
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I thought about making one for myself. I looked at what was being made out there. I priced different makes and models. There were some really cool makers. But anything I looked at was too costly for me. So, being a sculptor, I decided to build my own. Boy, was that a bumpy road. I tried one prototype and trashed it. Tried some other ideas and finally came up with some thing that looked like it might work. After some more bumps and kinks, I came up with this. There are still kinks in it. But it works and feels great. No feed back, good round warm sound that keeps up with the guitarist, Mike Barrette (a very excellent guitarist and a gentleman to boot!). I bought a good Digitech effects board to help me sound really cool. I found a pretty good amplifier. I'm using a 400watt bass amp! It has enough eq adjustments that I can keep that nice warm sound.
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Recently I purchased a Zeta 5 string violin. with a jazz bridge. The dry sound is very electronic. I warm up the sound through the digitech RP 20, it's not an ideal a violin sound. But it sounds really good. The logistics and ergonomics of the zeta body are very problematic! I won't go into the gory details but suffice it to say that I will be building another violin body with the Zeta electronics added on. I'll let you know how that goes when I get that far. I guess it's true what they say, an artist is never satisfied.
Enjoy the site. Feel free to email me with comments, questions, and money making opportunities.
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