Re: "Is it also the only instrument to have different names dependent on the style in which it is played?"

I can also think of harmonica vs. harp vs. mouth organ; guitar vs. axe; and piano vs. keyboard.

Regarding what people have said about fiddle bridges being flatter to make double stops easier; I don't understand how this works. When you're bowing two strings, your bow assumes the straight line between those two strings; how would the shape of the bridge or the location of the strings you're not playing affect where that straight line is? If anything it seems like a flatter bridge should be less forgiving, because it would take a smaller error in the angle to hit a wrong string.

Some general thoughts: I'm a novice fiddler, and a classically trained violinist has recently come into my life. She wants to learn fiddling, and we sat down together and tried a reel that neither of us knew. She commented that my intonation was off - not surprising, because at first reading I'm just trying to get the notes in the right order and right timing and not worrying too much about intonation. But I hadn't noticed. On the other hand, she played an eighth note where a quarter note was written (not a great photocopy) and didn't seem to notice, whereas it was glaring to me that there was a rhythm error in that bar.

Also, this girl gave me a violin piece to learn (Pachelbel's Canon in D) and said that it could be played by two or more violins as a round. So I've been working on it, and find it very different from any fiddle stuff I've done. The differences I observe are:

1. The Canon has rests in it - a few bars go note, rest, note, rest, and so on. I hadn't noticed this before, but I looked over the fiddle notebook and couldn't find any rests except those put at the end of tunes to get the right number of beats into a bar.

2. There is more variation in tempo within the piece - some bars contain all quarter notes, and some bars contain all thirty-second notes.

3. The melody is different, though it's harder to explain. There are bigger jumps between consecutive notes, and there are sequences that feel funny to my fingers even if the intervals aren't big.

Marion