David Burgess

What I'll say is that a good-sounding Scarampella may not be solely attributable to the talents of Mr. Scarampella, so I wouldn't make brand sound-quality generalizations for that particular maker. The same may apply to Strads.

How may Scarampellas haven't been regraduated? My guess would be very few, if a dealer wanted to get them out the door. When I started out in the trade, Scarampellas were a dime-a-dozen, gathering dust on back shelves, awaiting the time when market prices could justify the costs of needed interventions.

SpectraPlus is really nice, and that's what I use too, but I haven't investigated the various free-ware programs recently, to see if they can attain that level of utility.

Might enable you to sneak into the "women's business lunch" at the convention. I've had some ideas about how to go about that, too.

Leave it as is. I don't take a blade over the edge of a sharpening stone anyway, other than by accident. If you're worried about it, the CA thing might work OK to minimize any further chipping.

Been there, done that. As a minimally destructive example, I just spent (wasted?) over half a day researching the various things which could be dissolved in water, to make very pure water more electrically conductive, while being less corrosive than adding salt. (It had to do with steam conduction-type humidifiers). However, after fooling around with the bridge rocking-frequency thing for about 20 years, I think that it is really worth going after. Haven't come up with a "set of rules" yet. Seems to vary from instrument to instrument. One important thing I noticed was that when progressively lowering the bridge rocking frequency to find what worked best on a particular instrument, my impressions were different between my live listening and playing impressions at each stage, and those from listening to looped recordings of the progression at each stage, afterward. The recordings almost always suggested that my "live-impression" had lowered it several steps beyond optimal. As I've always said, one of the major hazards of our business is how easy it is to fool oneself, by one means or another.

Jerry, have you done a paisley rehair yet? (The old fart market needs to know....)

I've had my setup at Oberlin before, but you were too busy doing your "flags of the world" series of multicolored rehairs.

Will y'all please quit trying to be like us?

Probably. I use a setup much like Don has pictured, but I use a piezo strip instead of a microphone to take the signal. If you put one of your dudes or dudettes on it, I bet it would entail a lot less work than some of the articles they write. Thinking like you for a moment, the setup could be a quick connect/disconnect attachment to one of your lathes or milling machines, which already has a machinist's vise to clamp the bridge. Are you coming to the VSA Convention? I could bring some stuff.... Or I was thinking I could use it as a presentation when we're in Australia.

Perhaps, but there doesn't seem to be much of a problem distinguishing the instruments of Franceso and Omobono, from those of Antonio.

George, I don't know. Apparently, RFID chips can be copied, and much more easily so than making a convincing copy of a violin.

Yo, Jerry. Rocking frequency doesn't seem to change much over time. I've measured hardly any bridges from older shops, but I'm not sure how much that would matter anyway, since strings, playing styles, and tastes in sound have changed so much over the years.

That depends on what roles you think Francesco and Omobono played. “In 1824, the Cremonese biographer Vincenzo Lancetti, who had interviewed Count Cozio di Salabue in compiling an account of violin making in Cremona, described the work of Stradivari’s sons; according to his account, paraphrased by the Hills in their 1902 book on Stradivari, they “principally confined their efforts to repairing and adjusting instruments, aided in the varnishing and general management, so that the master might be free to devote himself unremittingly to the construction of his instruments." The above is from page 185 in the first volume of “The Conservation, Restoration, and Repair of Stringed Instruments and Their Bows”, article written by Hebbert. By the way, only Americans are allowed to use the term "trumpifying".

The spectrum analyzer I use has much higher resolution, but you'll probably be looking for a sharp peak between 2300 and 3700. If in doubt, you can attach a small weight to the top of the bridge, and see which peak within that range lowers in frequency. There will be bridge resonances outside that frequency range, but this isn't the vibrational mode we're discussing here, assuming that a "conventional" bridge is being used. Unlike some others here, I find marked differences as this "rocking frequency" changes. One area where I've found this very useful, is when a player wants a new bridge which sounds and plays very much like the old one. If I match the rocking frequency of the old bridge, I can come very close. If the frequency is very different, I'll usually have missed the target.