Letting people sleep

While the violin is a beautiful sounding instrument, when you are first learning it has a tendency to annoy anyone with in ear shot. This phenomena isn't exclusive to learning the violin, of course. I received many threats of bodily harm while learning the guitar as well. One thing I've gotten that has proven invaluable just for my room mates sanity has been a mute (shown above).

So if living with room mates or if you have close neighbors, a mute is an invaluable thing to have. You can still hear your instrument but it definitely lessons the noise and stops it from projecting into the next building.

I purchased my mute from Amazon.com for a few dollars so they are fairly inexpensive. They have a variety of styles to choose from. Some are made of rubber and some of brass. I can't comment on the effectiveness of the brass ones except to say that I was hesitant to purchase brass because It seemed to me that they could damage the strings I may be completely off base, If anyone has any experience with brass mutes I would love to hear about them. Either comment here or email me directly at fiddleronthe@gmail.com

Maybe in the future I'll weigh the pro's and cons of each.

My mute just slides over the strings and bridge as shown here. Mine can also adjust how much of the sound is muted by how far over the bridge it is place. The bigger the gap between the strings and the mute, the less it will be muted.