What is the difference between a violin and a fiddle?

Violin, or Fiddle?

There isn’t one. Mozart to Metis, Vivaldi to Diddly, we all play the exact same curvy wooden box, strung with catgut, nylon, steel or some combination thereof and scraped with horsehair (rubbed with tree sap).

Not only has this unlikely horse-cat-tree hybrid spread from Italy throughout the world, it also has ancestors and extended family all over the world, (Rebab, Erhu, Kamanche, Sarangi), and more recent in-laws (electric, octave, five string varieties)

Technique is not wildly different between violin playing and fiddle playing.As pretty much everyone that has either been or lived with a novice player knows well. There are a (very) limited number of ways to ‘torture catgut’ that would not ‘insult the dying agonies of a sow’ (the celebrated Robbie Burns on the subject).

So why even have two words?

The difference- a profound one - lies in the way the music is created, learned, remembered and recreated. Violinists are trained to read notation. Fundamentally, their musical brains and fingers are programmed to respond to visual information (score), the process goes score to brain to fingers to noise.Fiddle players learn by listening- usually growing up with an oral music tradition. Sounds are heard and internalised, then reimagined and this fires the fingers; noise to brain to fingers to noise.So it might look the same, but the way the violinist and fiddlist brains are wired, neural networks firing, the internal processing, and the resulting sound and style are quite different.

The difference between a fiddle and a violin: not the actual instrument, but the approach of the person playing it (I call myself a fiddle player).