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As a cello teacher I have a lot of students playing fractional size instruments. In almost all cases I think they do not work as good as they should, and I suspect as they in fact could. Ofcourse, a lot has to do with the brand of strings, but occasionally I come across a small cello that works very well, and I wonder why others don't. Strings that I have found to work best on 1/4 are Spirocore, for 1/2 Spirocore and Helicore, for 3/4 the sprirocores are not so good for the a and d strings anymore, and Larsen kicks in. Most small cellos, when strung with the above brands, surprisingly do not have a problem with the lower two strings. Evidently they don't sound as good as full size lower strings, but they work. The top two strings however, are nearly always problematic. They need a lot of bow pressure and slow bowing for responding, and even then sound quite terrible. This problem is worst with the most expensive set of fractional size strings that I know: Larsen strings. The a from Larsen has been terrible on any fractional below 3/4 size cello I've played. But as I said, occasionally you find a cello that works. Currently I have a student with a 1/2 Cello from the early 80-ies, terrible Nitro varnish, heavy wooden tailpiece with screwed on fine tuners, but with a set of fractional size spirocore it has a good sound and a good response time, quite good playing characteristics. Why is that? I'm wondering if there can be done more for the setup of small insruments than usually is done. I'm wondering wether these proportionally thinner sound posts really are better, are they not maybe too flexible? And I'm wondering wether the instruments maybe need sound posts fit with a little tension instead of without any. I'm wondering wether heavy tailpieces may work good on smaller cellos because they stop the small bodies from being "overpowered" by too much resonanse from the string, that would otherwise cause a kind of wolfy effect that makes them hard to bow. Can anyone comment on the special tricks for making fractional size cellos, in particular 1/4 and 1/2 cellos, work well?
