Michael Darnton

A couple of questions... What is the specific violin you are looking at for your model/inspiration? This is pretty important. Are you working from photos or drawings? Where did you get the idea for 41mm between the upper eyes? That's very unusual for a del Gesu! How did you decide where to put the nicks in the f-holes? How wide is the c-bout at its narrowest? What is the distance between the outsides of the lower eyes. We're looking for a number over the arch of around 128mm, more or less. What, precisely is is for your violin top in the photo? Why the questions? Because the f-holes in a violin are hung as if on a spider web--they're proportional to the outline and each other in a number of different ways. Oh, one more--what's the distance between the centers of the eyes on one f? Looking for a number around 63-64mm, probably.

4/4 capoed up a third. So the string length starts where you put your 2nd finger on a full size violin

I will tell you a tip to fix the most important part that didn't work for me: do make the arching disproportionally low; don't just scale it down from full size. A higher arch makes a very tight, small sounding instrument. In the same vein, I made the bar minimal. The tops of small instruments are disproportionally stiff because the ribs are never very far away. Many pochettes don't even have bars at all. I chose to work from photos rather than the Pringle drawing, which really bears no resemblance at all to the original. I think you can probably download them from the museum and use them to make templates, or as the templates themselves, for that matter, since you probably will only need them once. Scale the photos to the measurements. (For durable templates take the pix to Kinkos and have them laminated. It costs about five bux and is well worth it.)\ You might find it amusing to think of it as a half-size body with a 3/4 neck bearing a 4/4 string length that's been capoed up a minor third. That's actually how it's usually tuned so full size strings are in order.

Sometimes labels, even bad ones, can give legitimate tips. Like maybe the person who put it in might actually know something, or it nudges one's mind in a direction they hadn't considered looking, or to the right town but the wrong maker. It's the last thing to look at, but sometimes worthwhile. I don't have any great ideas.

I'm not a KIttel expert but I think the Vuillaume bow makers doing their own thing wasn't really an appropriate comparison in this situation. Perhaps the better comparison here is Vuillaume violins. We know JBV didn't usually make them and we sort of know a list of makers who did. But on their own none made anything that could in any way be compared with the JBV that they made in his shop; in fact they seem to be decidedly second rate makers as a group. Under JBV, with his constant supervision, they made a distinctive and unique product that we can recognize and know as a JBV violin, a superior thing to what they ever were capable of doing on their own. I think that's the current view, anyway. . . . maybe I am out of date.

Theoretical physics has proven to be a customer that buys very few violins, basically can't tell shit from shinola, and he hasn't passed on any practical wisdom that I can use for my adjustments. I am totally comfortable writing him off as not worth the time and effort.

My engineer father-in-law was a fan of the concept of emergent properties and there's a lot of that in violin adjustment. He'd be pleased, I think. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/emergent-property

If it's the kind of "knowledge" being imparted here, I totally disagree.

If I might be so bold as to suggest that it matters not a whit what the physics say; it's ALL about what the player says. My experience with players is that they're mostly concerned with gross tonal problems (a whole string or range that's out of line with the rest, for instance) and especially with functional behavioral characteristics (response, squeals, attack). If they wanted a violin that sounded tonally completely different they'd have bought that violin in the first place.

This extract from Feast Watson's full desciption of the product you are using makes it sound very much like this product is NOT intended for us with finishes like shellac, but for turpentine/oil-type finishes. If so, it's inherently soft and unfriendly to shellac's drying. @ https://www.feastwatson.com.au/products/flooring/prooftint >>Finish with Feast Watson Timber Floor Wax, Clear Varnish, Weatherproof™ Pro or Scandinavian Oil™ to seal the topcoat and give lasting protection, or add to our oil-based Liming White to create a range of fabulous pastel shades. Timber stain colours never looked this good. Note: Do NOT add directly to Floorclear or Wipe-On Poly.

The most telling visible quality issue I find in bridges doesn't show up until much later, and that's the collapse of the bridge gap above the thigh on the E string side. This is very common and doesn't have anything to do with things like tasty ray figure, precise quartering, grain width, etc. I think it's entirely about fundamental wood strength. You'd think that perfect wood wouldn't bend forward or back, but I think that warping bridges in that plane is more a matter of good bridge cutting and precise angle to the top than wood. I've seen plenty of garbage wood bridges maintain just fine without warping so this doesn't seem like a very strong test of bridge blank quality. I do see a lot of perfectly straight bridges collapsing under the E, though,

Given that lees are mostly dead yeast it seems like that it would be easy to prove or disprove they are there under the violin varnish somewhere.

Regarding John's comment, the old British makers often used two varnishes, a harder yellow/brown one on cheaper wood and dark red on flashy wood, two different price grades, obviously. Setting these instruments up for modern players, the yellow ones oftenwork quite well, easily, but making the thick and mushy red stuff sound good can be a challenge. So that could be part of it. Another part is that often the very best old Cremonese violins are beat to hell and back because they were the working tools of the best busy working players specifically because of their quality AND part of the facts of wear is that most of their varnish will have been worn off a long time ago leaving yellow wood and ground. On the other hand the plush red ones have often ended up in collections because of their amazing state of preservation, which is another way of saying that no one ever really wanted to play those because as instruments some of them weren't that great. So that could be a factor as well. Don't take this as an inevitability, just as a general trend that can be observed--there are plenty of exceptions, too.

The bridge problem is confounded by the fact that each manufacturer has different target objectives, so the top bridge in each brand will have slightly (or greatly) different tonal results, all of them being "good" in some way or another, if the luthier does their job well. A shop will chose based on their own tonal objectives and by which bridges seem to work best with their style of cutting and tonal objectives. (Milo Stamm works well for me where Aubert deluxe, treated I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but that's just me, my method, and my targets, and not a universal opinion.) Within a brand a lot of the price is based on cosmetics rather than function, but not all of it. The second from the top bridge blank in a line can be quite good at a much lower cost, if you care about that. Your best approach would probably be to pick some shop whose tonal results consistently appeal to you and let them do what they think they should do, and if you want to throw extra money at it for cosmetics, let them know. Regarding what I take to be the real question, choose your shop more carefully than you choose the bridge blank. The results are more dependent on the worker than the blank used, and it is possible for a shop to do a terrible job with a good blank. Or alternately to do a great job with a terrible (looking, bearing in mind what I said about a lot of bridge quality being visual) blank. Many makers/setup people will not appreciate being told by a violinist what they should do and what bridge blank to use, considering that the person wanting to give direction probably knows a lot less about the problem than they do (hopefully, or why did you go there?) You might find some who tell you that if you're so smart, maybe you should just do it yourself and show you to the door. :-) So be tactful.

That's a point, also. I do believe that post tension specifically is something that can be demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction once everyone's on the same page. I now have players in my flock who can monitor the state of their violins and bring them in when there's an adjustment needed, knowing that I can immediately cure the problem because we are speaking the same language and they know what I can fix. They now also know what post tension does, and know when they have lost that. And they can hear it when it's fixed, as can everyone in the room. This isn't really an esoteric adjustment, out of all the things to test. (And to cut this part short, no I am not interested in sharing on this point and don't care even a tiny bit if someone chooses not to believe me. If you really want to talk about it come visit me where I can prove what I am saying.) Traditional science works with indicators which are previously proven to discriminate results of the type being searched. Grabbing uncertified and unidentified test strips out of a drawer (or any violinist who can be roped into the room) isn't really science. Especially when the person doing the adjustments doesn't himself know what he's looking for and can't identify the effects when they happen (grabbing random alleged violin "adjusters" out of that same drawer.)