Love fiddles. Hate violins. ???

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Where I live it seems the only way to someone to become a successful musician is by playing the fiddle. We even now have a gigantic fiddle as a tourist attraction down at the harbor. I've jokingly said that if I ever learned to play the fiddle I would always call it a violin, and only play classical tunes on it like, Toccatta and Fugue by Bach, and will act really insulted and sneery by anyone who asks me to play "the fiddle". But I'm just being silly. I will probably never learn to play the fiddle or violin ever.

They are the same piece of hardware, but they have different operating systems. Lol!

Actually a classical violin is tuned one way, and if you tune it the other way you have a bluegrass fiddle. Or that's my nonmusician's understanding of it.

Musicians tell me that the way W.C. Handy and Louis Armstrong used a trumpet is so different from how trumpets are used in classical symphony that "for practical purposes the trumpet becomes a whole different instrument".

There are other examples of the same instrument not being the same instrument. Accoustic guitars are tuned a certain way to be picked or strummed by the fingers of over the big hole under the strings on the sound box. And electric rock guitars inherited that same tuning systems when they came into use in the rock era even though the guitar body no longer functions to amply the guitar (the electirical amp/speaker does that). But in the eighties Jazz guitarists Stanley Jordan began to play the electric like a harpsichord or piano by placing both hands on the fretboard and "hammering" the strings with his fingertips to both mark off the notes AND to strike the sound from the string. Rockers like Van Halen also began to do similiar "hammer on" techniques on the electric about the same time. But the guitar has to be radically retuned totally differently from the tradtional guitar tuning for you to be able to play it that way.

There is literally no difference between a fiddle or a violin, they are the same instrument, it's just how it's played. I like this video to explain the difference:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnLF-FRnOM8[/youtube]

I love both, depending on my mood. Good old Celtic music
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn_rznQkJjY[/youtube]

I love it when they make the violin "cry" like in this song:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQ6eHeBrhM&list=FLk2vNxrpE_bGfzX6qPsXmvw&index=70[/youtube]