Aug 7, 2018
My guest today is Val Vigoda. She started to sing and sight read at a very young age, and then started to play the classical violin at the age of eight. She wound up joining the Army ROTC to pay for school, so she rocked Princeton and went on to serve in the military. Then she actually made a switch. She continued with the music but began playing the electric violin, and that lead to her touring the world with well known artists like Cyndi Lauper, Joe Jackson and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. She went on to form her own band called Groove Lilly and continued to tour the world with them. Next, she decided to take some time off from the road so that she could focus in on raising her son, Mose. That's when she spent about ten years writing music for Disney. Then, most recently, she has won awards for additional musicals, including her most recent called Ernest Shackleton Loves Me. If that were not enough, she's been touring the country as a speaker, sharing the stage with people like former First Lady Michelle Obama. She speaks with audiences about facing your fears, rising to challenges, pushing your edges, and thriving in uncertainty. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: ValVigoda.com INTERVIEW: Thank you so much, Mitch. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. I can say, watching some of your performances, it's just so captivating to see you play, and see you sing, and then see you inspire the audience. I want to hear about all of it, but as I was doing my research, this question kept coming to me; you were classically trained on a standard wood violin. You now use an instrument that is, let’s just say, technologically advanced. What was it like when you made that transition to go from that classical, classically-built wood instrument to something using this level of technology? What was that transition like? Well, it was actually a gradual thing. The violin that I play now is actually called a Viper. It's a six-string flying V-shaped violin that's sort of strapped onto my body with a guitar strap. Of course, it's called a Viper. Of course, it is. Growing up as a classical violinist and also a singer, those two activities were always very separate for me, and I loved both of them. I loved playing the violin. I loved singing. I loved singing in choirs and singing by myself. As I grew up, I realized that what I really wanted to do was combine those two. I wanted to write my own songs, and I wanted to sing, and I wanted to use my violin in that way. So I started experimenting with that. Playing an acoustic violin in more of a pop setting, in a band, can be challenging regarding projecting sound. I bet. You can put a pickup on the bridge, and there are many different ways to amplify an acoustic violin that way, but there are also some trip-ups, especially if you're singing. If you have a mic on the bridge, your breathing can be picked up by the violin mic. There are many feedback issues, and the natural warmth of the instrument is hard to capture when you're doing it in an electric setting, so I started looking at electric instruments. The first couple that I used were sort of like regular violins but just electrified, so it's a resonant chamber on the hollow body. It would be a solid body instrument, and it would be sort of like an electric guitar. You plug it in, and sound would come out. As I started experimenting with that, the violin was sounding pretty good, but I couldn't very well sing and play at the same time. I saw someone very inspiring when I was living in New York. This woman played at The Bitter End. Her name was Allison, and she was amazing because she could play and sing at the same time. I said, "Oh, she can do it. I can do it," so I started working on that. Then I heard about this amazing inventor, a violin maker named Mark Wood, who makes a bunch of different styles of violin.