The Violin Beautiful

Sweat stained areas tend to be grey in my experience. The varnish gets worn off and the nearly bare or bare wood gets discolored. If it’s polished over, it tends to stay fairly grey with some brown and green. To recreate sweat, maybe acid/salt applications could be used in conjunction with removal of varnish. I’ve heard of people using something pointed like a bamboo skewer to depress summer grains in spruce to imitate exaggerated corduroy effects in worn/sweat-damaged areas.

As you pointed out, the windings are separated a bit. A sharp edge in the string groove may have caught the string or it might have gotten pinched by a narrow spot. Have it checked out and lubricated to avoid the same issue in the future. Damage to the winding usually shortens the life of the string because it will continue to unravel. At this stage I’d probably just keep using the strings while keeping an eye on them. If you’re going to be performing, you could change strings a week or two beforehand just to be on the safe side.

I too am very sorry to hear about the Newark School’s woes. So much good has come from that school that it’s a shame to lose it. I think that the problem is fairly complicated. Part is likely the mindset of universities, which have prioritized recruitment and enrollment over being welcoming centers of learning for whole communities. At one time colleges invited the public onto campus for events to encourage them to take part in their offerings. Now they have become more insular and they sell the campus to parents by touting their security measures to keep non-students out. I suspect that another part is simply a changing market for new violins. While prices have gone up steadily, purchasing power for the average violin buyer has not followed that increase. There remains a sweet spot in the $5-10k range that fulfills the needs of buyers who are looking for an upgrade from the full size violin they bought with rental credit, something that’s good enough to use throughout the remainder of high school and perhaps into college as a non-music major. The number of options in that range used to be quite large, but now many violins have moved out of that category. You could get a good old French violin or a top level Roth or a good American violin for $10,000 only a a decade ago, but now all of those things have moved beyond that level. New German violins made in factories have started to fill that spot along with “master level” Chinese factory violins. Add to that the recent explosion of the low-end Cremonese market. It used to be difficult to get anything from Cremona by a single maker for under $12k, but now many established makers are carving out a large share in the lower range by selling workshop instruments made by apprentices for under $10k and offering their own as higher level options, and makers fresh out of the Cremona school have begun offering their instruments at even lower prices, some of them doing so by moving out of Cremona but keeping a P.O. box there so they can still claim to be making Cremonese violins. That makes competition tough for new makers who are trying to establish themselves, as the market over $10k is much wider and pits new instruments against firmly established older instruments that tend to sell faster. When the prospects of getting into the trade are that strained, it’s quite difficult to make the decision to dedicate oneself to it. Shorter instruction courses in the summertime and online tutorials have become more popular with those interested. The players in this part of the market are less concerned with the amount of hand vs. machine work in a violin, so the “handmade” aspect that once attracted buyers to that price range is losing relevance. Violin making schools have never been moneymaking operations, and you hear stories from people who went back at a time when the schools were in better shape about having to burn instruments in the winter to stay warm. Many are privately funded with limited resources, and those that receive public funds are always in danger of being shuttered when there are budget cuts or changes of priorities in the institutions to which the making programs are attached.

Just like violins and cellos, I find adjusting afterlength on violas to be worthwhile. With cellos, you tend to end up with a bit of a gap between the tailpiece and saddle because the average tailpiece isn’t long enough to reach the saddle. Cello tailpieces seem to be treated in a one-size-fits-all manner, so they look a little silly on larger cellos, but one does what one must in setup.

I’ve seen a few combinations (Dominant/Chromcor, Evah/Prim, Vision/Prim, Warchal Brilliant Vintage/Special Russian A/Amber E) in addition to the steel Rondo and Timbre options.

I think the G was wound to reduce the thickness of the string, as the natural gut G didn’t speak as easily and took a lot more effort from the bow to get a good tone. Early violin music tended to avoid much use of the G string for this reason. The wound G opened the door for more expression.

I see players from time to time with the “Russian setup,” which involves a synthetic G and D and a steel A and E. Players in this school tend to like there being a stronger contrast between the upper and lower strings. A few string brands have come out with steel A strings as an option for this kind of setup (Warchal’s Special Russian A and the Rondo streel A come to mind). I read that Pirastro debuted the first wound A in the 1950s but it took a decade for players to warm up to it. When Dominants came out they were very quickly adopted and thereafter the aluminum-wound A was commonplace.

The only planetary gear system I’m aware of is in the Wittner FineTune pegs, and that’s in the heads of the pegs. The gears would have to be extremely small to be fitted into the shaft of the peg. Add to that the need for a socket to attach the tuning key and the gears would have to be recessed quite far. I don’t know if a system more like Pegheds or Knilling Perfection could be modified to accommodate this design. The friction fit of the peg head could be replaced by a socket that the key would fit into, but the problem might be in loosening the fit; with the Pegheds you can simply pull the peg head out further to lower friction and turn the peg head more quickly.

The first steel strings were developed around 1910 or so. Prior to that the strings were gut or silk. In the beginning of the violin’s history plain gut was prevalent, but it wasn’t long before the G string started being wound with silver. Steel strings started to be used more when there was a shortage of gut during the pause in trading caused by World War I. When gut was hard to obtain, players would use steel as a compromise, but it wasn’t considered to be a very good substitute, which is why players who had access to a good selection chose wound gut regularly until the advent of synthetic core strings. Many American fiddlers adopted steel strings when they were more widely available and cheaper, and they have remained the popular choice for fiddling ever since. As far as makers deliberately designing violins for Evahs and Rondos, I doubt that many of them are aiming for specific string sets, but it is conceivable that some of them are considering the popularity of higher tension sets and trying to make with that in mind. Much of the style of making is established by violin making schools, though, and I think the schools are more concerned with other aspects of making. Most of the new Italians I see arrive set up with Dominants or Tonicas from the makers. It’s the shops and luthiers that set them up again that tend to switch to Rondos for more power. I really hesitate to identify an overall trend in making because there are many different methodologists, including those who make violins following the current measurements of Cremonese instruments, those who make violins trying to follow what are believed to be original measurements (del Gesu in particular), those aiming at making lighter weight instruments, those looking to make more robust instruments, and those who are using acoustic measurement equipment to guide their graduations.

I think mostly plastic.

I had the impression the same thing was happening with Oberlin. After the varnish “incident” in the bass making workshop it seemed like the school had the summer workshop on a timer. The pandemic provided an excuse—once the programs had been paused it was easier not to resume them. I was disappointed to see the programs shuttered but I’m glad the VSA has found a new spot for now.

UNH decided to oust the Violin Craftsmanship Institute. The instructors would have happily gone back to in-person instruction but the University didn’t want to resume the program. College campuses have taken a much more insular approach in recent years and have attempted to limit public access by cutting out programs that would bring non-students in (except for prospective students and alumni who will give them money, of course!). That way, they can tell parents of students that security is more stringent without hiring any extra campus security personnel.

At the first shop where I worked, the policy was to suggest to the customer that a new board was warranted for both tonal and structural reasons once the thickness dropped below 4 mm. I tend to consider the big picture when looking at this: will a new fingerboard solve enough problems to make sense to the customer? If the thickness is reduced substantially, a new board at a more conventional thickness will change the projection. A new bridge will likely be in order, and that needs to be considered in an explanation to the customer. I’ll plane a fairly thin board if the grooves are shallow enough that I’m not really reducing the edge thickness (they’re almost always too round anyway, so that gives me something to work with). I check the scoop to see how much will need to come out and I look to see if the board is twisted. If I can tell that the board is especially dense, I might let it go a little thinner. I also take into account the impact that the change in thickness will have on the feel of the neck. Some people try to get around the problem of a thick neck by simply cutting the board down; putting a new one on will make the neck bulky, and the customer will not be happy if that’s not understood ahead of time. I strive to anticipate these problems so there aren’t any surprises and the customer doesn’t end up feeling as though the work is just a way to obligate more work and expense. I have seen a lot of fingerboards that warped as a result of being left too thin and unable to keep the neck straight. Sometimes this even happens with thicker fingerboards if the neck is too green and there’s a lot of strain, but most of the time a well made and selected fingerboard will help keep things from going too far awry.

Soundpost adjustment is all about getting a violin to work well for a player. If you want to call it confirmation bias to do just that, have at it. An adjustment is in a sense a negotiation between three parties. The violin has finite qualities that give it a certain character (e.g. arching, graduations, body length, rib height, etc.) although there is some room to refine its voice through setup and adjustment. You can adjust within these parameters but you can’t go further without some kind of major change to the body of the violin. The luthier has working experience or training to draw from and a personal philosophy for adjustment that must allow room for flexibility in order to be able to work with customers. There are some luthiers who are very dogmatic about a magic soundpost position that must be the same for every violin, but they tend to have a reputation for something other than their tonal results. The player has personal preferences for response and tone in a violin as well as a highly developed sensitivity to changes in tone and response in a particular violin that comes from spending hours a day with the violin right at the ear. I can’t keep track of the number of times players have come to me for an adjustment and said something like “I showed the violin to [luthier]. He said he didn’t hear anything and just told me I was imagining things or I was doing something wrong.” The frustration at this kind of comment is intense because the player does hear something (more often than not the player is correct) and saying that the instrument is fine is a denial of the player’s reality. A player may begin with a price range, maker, regional style, or era, but once things are narrowed down, the choice of instrument to buy comes down to the way the instrument performs. When the player finds the combination of things that meet personal requirements, a sale occurs. Those requirements may be entirely subjective but they are no less real than anything that can be plotted on a graph or analyzed in a lab. So when an adjustment takes place, there is a meeting of these three parties, and for there to be a favorable outcome they must work in concert. If a player or luthier tries to steamroll and make the other parties conform without negotiation to their demands, at least two out of three parties will end up shortchanged, and there’s a good chance all three will be unhappy. If you’re adjusting for a player, the player needs to be happy with the results for it to be a success, but getting to that point is much more likely when the three parties are on the same page.

What is your evidence for this? And if adjusting the soundpost is not the solution to the problem, why is it that the people who actually play in the Kennedy Center notice an improvement in sound with adjustment? Are all these professional players wrong or have you just not understood what happens in a good adjustment?