Gah

Spent a bit of time yesterve playing with an FV-1 (a Fender electric violin) played through a Rockman—a tiny battery-powered headphone amp usually used for practicing electric guitars silently, without waking one's sleeping family.

Reaction: gah! Terrible, terrible, terrible tone. Fiddled with the knobs endlessly, and whatever I did, it still just sounded dreadfully tinny.

This is probably partly that I'm pretty new to the instrument, and my tone isn't exactly gorgeous even on a decent acoustic violin. But I don't sound that bad. The setup somehow made it vastly worse.

Suspect it has to do with the inputs in the Rockman having been built more for guitar, which is probably much heavier on the amplitude in the lower frequencies, lighter higher, and thus needs the amp to pump up the higher while throttling the lower. Do that with a violin's tone balance, and you get no bass, and a terribly raspy, whiny treble... added to the fact that a Rockman isn't exactly the warmest-sounding device in the world to begin with.

Thinkin' there has to be a business opportunity there: portable practice amps for electric violins which don't make them sound quite so dreadful. It really isn't much of an incentive to practice, hearing it sounding that incredibly bad.