Open strings are much louder than fingered strings, so mostly, to get a consistent sound, you would play the E on the A string to keep it from sounding too much different from the other stopped notes. Sometimes you might want the unstopped sound for expressiveness, but I was told that open strings are mostly frowned upon.
Well, I did not get very far, just a few years, but in the early part, they teach you the four finger placements. Obviously, you can go further down the string, I think you can play into the E string on the D string, but initially, they kind of teach the fourth finger as the last stop.
I just meant that a guitar can play a nice chord just by strumming the open strings, a violin does not have very pleasing harmonics like that. I got to some music where it called for playing two strings at the same time (bowed), never really got the hang of that.
Ok, and I’m back to suggest that although anyone is free to call any note or group of notes a chord, if you want to have anything like a more in-depth conversation about music, theory, etc., you might want to limit your use of the word, chord, to things that have at least three notes and that are employed in a tonal system in some functional way. Strumming two strings on a violin can certainly imply functional harmony, but most people would have a hard time calling any two notes a chord, particularly since any two notes can be part of many, many chords - in the same way that two points don’t necessarily make a circle, but three do.
This is not true as a general statement for playing violin or fiddle. It might just be one of those things you tell beginners to encourage proper skill development.
Well, I did not get very far, just a few years, but in the early part, they teach you the four finger placements. Obviously, you can go further down the string, I think you can play into the E string on the D string, but initially, they kind of teach the fourth finger as the last stop.
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This is just for teaching absolute beginners. Once you are playing, you don’t think of the fifth interval as the “last stop” at all.
All six strings? Strumming all six open strings on a guitar doesn’t give you a chords that’s commonly used, and that’s because it’s widely perceived as not sounding very good.
And I still don’t get the point. The violin is played very differently than the guitar. Indeed, you can really only play two strings at a time (double stop). You can’t play real chords on a violin.
And even if you could, I don’t see the significance of whether you could or could not play all open strings.
That’s true only if it’s tuned to some form of “open tuning.” Standard tuning on a guitar is E-A-D-G-B-E, which doesn’t form what would usually be described as a “nice chord,” but can be called an Em7add11 (among other things) if you want to put a name to it and assume E as the root.
Joking aside, “almost never” is wayyyyy off. There are some stylistic differences between classical music and folk music that result in more open stringing in the latter, but it’s still quite common to play open strings in classical music.
OK, I’ll take your word for that. The one time I ever handled a violin, I managed to produce the approximate sound of a half-neutered cat dying in agony while wet, which isn’t really a major component of the classical or folk tradition.
Former cellist chiming in: I was also taught to avoid open strings unless there was no way to play the music otherwise or if you wanted a particular effect. IIRC, the reasoning included a noticable difference in tone “quality” or “colour”, issues with sound levels and the impossibility of using vibrato on an open string (actually possible but awkward).
Switch to the cello. You’ll produce the sound of a dying cow. Much less unpleasant for your neighbours and funnier. MOOooOOOoooo.