YH Music Lab Featured Artist:

Armand Aromin

Violinist and Luthier

On his journey:

I went to Berklee College of Music for about 2 ½ years and then realized I didn’t want to be in music education and then I dropped out, because that’s what you do when you go to Berklee. And then I went to the University of Limerick in Ireland (cause I thought that’s what I wanted to do), for a semester, left, and then went back to Boston to do violin making. I graduated three years ago, and now I’m standing here.

I have a duo with my partner Ben, and we tend to do a lot of folk music, a lot of English folk songs, Irish tunes, English tunes, Swedish tunes, American songs and tunes, like anything that sounds catchy and attractive to us, we’ll kind of make it our own. We’ll even do a few Muppet songs!

Armand Ivy Leaf Project

Photograph by Your Heaven Audio

On the challenges of amplifying his violin:

On the challenges of amplifying his violin: I tried a built-in violin pick-up but that involved tuning the strings down, lifting up the bridge, and I didn’t realize at the time, but it’s an added layer underneath the bridge so the action’s going to be higher, and because this rubber material was going over the top of the instrument it’s slightly muting.

And because you’re not having the wood-to-wood contact between the bridge feet and the body, you’re also kind of missing out [as] it’s vibrating less freely. So, that was annoying!

So, more regularly I use a clip on condenser, an Audio Technica one.

But, because of the nature of some of my gigs, I end up getting annoying feedback, especially if I’m trying to play with a band that has amplified instruments. It’s such a nightmare! It gives me like, anxiety to play a gig like that because I know that they have to crank me up, but they can’t because that’s just going to feed back as soon as all the other instruments start playing.

On trying the CloseUp® System for the first time:

This [CloseUp® System] is pretty awesome! It sounds like my instrument. Yeah, I really like it. It’s nice because it just sounds like an amplified version of what I’m already playing.

The low end doesn’t sound too muddy or boomy at all. The high end is not overly bright. It almost It almost doesn’t sound like there’s an amplifier next to me. It just sounds like my instrument somehow got louder. Which would be awesome!