The Eviola

The eviola is a special instrument that only Lightning wielders can use. Read on to learn more about its origins and the finer details of playing it!

Origin story

I grew up playing the violin so I was quite familiar with stringed instruments. The origin of this instrument is from one of the ridiculous things we would do in music class. Most chairs in schools have the smooth tops of the metal screws that attach the legs to the chair on the surface of the plastic seat. So if you’re wearing jeans and you rub your legs back and forth, you build up static. My friends and I used to love doing this and then shock each other unexpectedly. One day, I was doing this in music class and had the brilliant idea to touch the wire string of my friend’s violin. It worked like a dream! The electricity travelled up the string and shocked my friend’s fingers all the way up at the neck of the violin! And thus, the eviola was born.

The eviola

Despite its name, the eviola isn’t actually held like a violin or viola. Instead of being held under the chin, its cradled like a guitar. But eviola sounds way cooler than e-guitar, which is already a thing. In the world of Dome, some people also call it a handolin!

Anyway, most eviolas have five strings, one for each finger. The wire strings are anchored into the eviola by a metal screw that each finger is placed on. I like to believe that the nicer ones have ergonomically shaped screws with little cradles for the fingers to rest in. Besides these changes, it looks relatively similar to other stringed instruments. It has holes in the hollow body to allow the sound to reverberate and a neck where the left hand presses on the strings to change the pitch.

Playing the eviola

Of course Lightning is a key part of the eviola. The right hand provides the Lightning into the metal screws which causes the strings to vibrate. The more Lightning, the louder the sound. The left hand changes the pitch up at the neck of the instrument.

With a violin or viola, the right hand holds the bow. There are so many intricacies of using a bow, from how loud the notes are, to the tempo, and more. These are all fulfilled by the flow of Lightning in the eviola, making it an extremely complicated instrument. An interesting deviation in the instrument compared to a violin, is that the bow usually only plays one string. It can straddle two strings, but they have to be next to each other. This limit doesn’t exist for an eviola since each finger can be controlled independently.

This makes the eviola more like a hybrid between violin and guitar. In guitar, you can strum multiple strings allowing you to play chords. This is also possible in the eviola. Honestly, the instrument is just so cool. I’m not a professional musician, or even a good violinist to be honest, so the full implications of the instrument are lost on me!

Other instruments

I believe an entire book could be written on all the cool instruments that people could play in the world of Dome. Lightning itself offers several other possibilities, like even a piano alternative comes to mind.

Of course, Sound Producers would deserve an entire section of their own. The second book does go a little more into using these Powers for a stage production.

Another Power that just seemed like it’s begging to be explored musically is Wind. I mean, literal Wind instruments? Come on, that’s awesome! But I didn’t want to dedicate so much precious real estate in the books when other things needed to happen. Maybe a side story will have to fill the void!

Next up

Next post will be talking about the origin of some of the city names in Dome series. While only a few cities are named, almost all of them had an interesting, or at least strange, thought process behind them.