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Violin was my first instrument, but I've mostly played guitar for the past ten years or so. I guess I was a musician long before I was a hacker, and I see a lot of similarities between the two - the variety of things you can do, the amount of time it takes to become decent at either, etc.

Surprisingly enough I've never tried to bring the two together. Signal modelling/processing software...talk about 'hard problems'!

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I took a similar path - violin for 9 years, then switched to guitar when I was about 16 (to be cool, of course). I didn't completely drop the violin, but guitar was my main instrument for the later part of high school. But then I picked the violin up again for All States my senior year, and kept doing it for college. Surprisingly it's violin that stuck - I still play a couple times a week, while I haven't touched my guitar in close to a year.

I've also dabbled in a bunch of other instruments - 3 years of clarinet in middle school, enough viola to play and (barely) read music, picked up a fife and tin whistle in Williamsburg, reasonably fluent on bass guitar, and I've been trying to teach myself piano over the past couple years, with only slight success.

A friend of mine was an electrical engineer and a drummer. For a senior project he made some electronic drums. Bessel functions are hard :)

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