And buying a violin that you later find you can't use would probably be silly
That's why I said "cheap" – indeed, I certainly wouldn't want to put any remotely serious amount of money into the idea until (unless) I was sure it was going to be worthwhile!
Playing tunes from my memory is something I've done a lot of – most of my guitar-dabbling consisted of playing my own guitar arrangements of songs I knew from my (or other people's) CD collection, concocted out of my own imagination rather than by the more traditional method of getting hold of official or unofficial tab transcriptions from elsewhere. (As a result they tended to be essentially instrumental translations of songs, in that what I tended to be able to remember and hence what I reproduced on the guitar was the vocal melody plus as much of the accompaniment as I could fit alongside it, rather than the more usual approach of having the guitar play just the accompaniment and leaving the voice part to the voice.) It's just that on the guitar I had to do it by working the fingering out in advance; on the violin, it turns out, I can improvise it in real time to a large extent.
Hire purchase from somewhere like Millers/Ken Stevens might make sense. Think of yourself as renting it for a while until you decide if you want it, and hey if it turns out you like it after a year you can keep it!
I am teaching myself (v slowly) to play my mum's acoustic guitar. In order to sing along to one of the first two songs in it I first learned the two chords needed, and then *using the guitar* picked out the tune of the song to work out what I was singing. I'm *hopeless* at sight-singing, even when I can sight-read to play something. It's weird. I'm already getting better at picking out individual notes on the guitar (which is much like doing the same on the bass, which I am also not very good at) but I think it's going to be a *long* time before I get the hang of chords. Not least because I keep reading the fingering diagrams back-to-front.
I don't play my bass much, I've not played mum's guitar much (though I have at least got it new strings and restrung it), and I barely touch the cornet, but I still feel overall glad to have them more often than guilty for not playing them more.
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That's why I said "cheap" – indeed, I certainly wouldn't want to put any remotely serious amount of money into the idea until (unless) I was sure it was going to be worthwhile!
Playing tunes from my memory is something I've done a lot of – most of my guitar-dabbling consisted of playing my own guitar arrangements of songs I knew from my (or other people's) CD collection, concocted out of my own imagination rather than by the more traditional method of getting hold of official or unofficial tab transcriptions from elsewhere. (As a result they tended to be essentially instrumental translations of songs, in that what I tended to be able to remember and hence what I reproduced on the guitar was the vocal melody plus as much of the accompaniment as I could fit alongside it, rather than the more usual approach of having the guitar play just the accompaniment and leaving the voice part to the voice.) It's just that on the guitar I had to do it by working the fingering out in advance; on the violin, it turns out, I can improvise it in real time to a large extent.
I am teaching myself (v slowly) to play my mum's acoustic guitar. In order to sing along to one of the first two songs in it I first learned the two chords needed, and then *using the guitar* picked out the tune of the song to work out what I was singing. I'm *hopeless* at sight-singing, even when I can sight-read to play something. It's weird. I'm already getting better at picking out individual notes on the guitar (which is much like doing the same on the bass, which I am also not very good at) but I think it's going to be a *long* time before I get the hang of chords. Not least because I keep reading the fingering diagrams back-to-front.
I don't play my bass much, I've not played mum's guitar much (though I have at least got it new strings and restrung it), and I barely touch the cornet, but I still feel overall glad to have them more often than guilty for not playing them more.