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Posted
5 hours ago, scordatura said:

I am curious about the Sam Z. “Gluey” project. Pics and info?

When I saw it, the surface of the fiddle was sealed with some kind of clear sealant.. no colored varnish. Experimental reinforcing strips (sort of like long cleats) could be attached to the outside with melted rosin, and easily popped back off.

Posted

It’s a very ordinary Chinese violin that’s been regraduated very thin. Surface is sealed with shellac. The stffening strips are a variety of dimensions and coated on one side with rosin. To apply a strip it is placed on the surface and a heated spoon applied to the strip, melting the rosin and adhering the strip. It made for a fascinating test platform.
in one experiment careful notes were made on tonal changes as strips were applied but as the strips were removed in reverse order the tonal changes did not match the original impressions. Intriguing! 

Posted
On 2/25/2022 at 1:23 AM, Oded Kishony said:

in one experiment careful notes were made on tonal changes as strips were applied but as the strips were removed in reverse order the tonal changes did not match the original impressions. Intriguing! 

Interesting.

What did. the ‘careful notes’ try to describe? And ‘not match’ can be diametrically different or just not quite exactly what was perceived before. 

From my own experience with sound experiments I can say that if we visually change something our brain tries to convince our ears to hear something different, even if there is nothing. 

Looking in such an experiment with a very sober mind one must conclude that the glued on strips and the resulting increase in stiffness does not cause any predictable and significant alteration to the sound. 
 

What was the conclusion of participants?


 

 

Posted

The changes in the sound were unmistakable and the nature of the changes generally agreed upon.

One reason these strips had an effect is because the violin is quite thin.

The notes, as I recall, were brief and noted the most obvious and agreed upon changes.

All the participants were very experienced violinmakers. It’s much easier to be objective if you don’t have any stake in the outcome.

Posted

What I am after is to make adjustments after the initial build. The concept would be leave the top/back a little on the thick side, lightly glue the top, then play and evaluate. Remove the top and thin in areas to achieve certain sound and playability outcomes/changes to the existing plates.

Posted
1 hour ago, scordatura said:

What I am after is to make adjustments after the initial build. The concept would be leave the top/back a little on the thick side, lightly glue the top, then play and evaluate. Remove the top and thin in areas to achieve certain sound and playability outcomes/changes to the existing plates.

Good luck with that.

I have never had much success with that approach, not for lack of trying.  I don't know the exact details of the Gluey initial thickness, but whenever I am in a reasonable weight&thickness range, tonally targeted modifications never amounted to much.  Wood and arching are difficult to change, and account for a lot of the result, IMO.

Posted

Granted thickness is a small variable. I keep thinking about Luiz Bellini telling me "I thickness the top to 2.8 or 2.9. I adjust the arching height to the characteristics of the wood." I should have mentioned above that I would not be opposed in a rare case to add wood! I also remember Melvin Goldsmith talking about making the top on the thick side and adjusting if necessary. Never played his instruments though.

Posted

Well, Don and I have done this dance quit a few times now. Ultimately the only way for you to know is to try it yourself.

I have found it quite useful and there are a number of professional makers who utilize some version of fine tuning the instrument in the white.

A few caveats:

the thicker/heavier the instrument the less effect changes to the arching/graduations. When you scrape from the outside you are also making a subtle change in arching. This is very intuitive.

thinking about individual frequencies/modes is not very useful because every spot on the violin affects many multiple modes/frequencies.

much has been made about the question of what happens after you varnish. Certainly the varnish changes the sound but you should know (or find out) what acoustical effect your varnish has. Also keep in mind that the same is true for whatever system you use, the varnish will always change the sound somewhat. But in my experience if a fiddle sounds good in the white, it will sound good after it's varnished.

randomly scraping the surface is mostly futile. You need to be able to predict what changes will occur from any given spot.

I use a couple of variations based on the simple principle of reciprocity ie vibrations going from the string to the corpus (body) equal vibrations going from the corpus to the string. This means that if you scratch or tap the white (unvarnished) instrument with your finger nail you will hear different strings and harmonics start to ring out (on a tuned instrument)

It is my belief (religion) that the great makers of Cremona utilized some form of this technique. It has been noted that they finished the instrument from the outside (see Roger Hargrave see below page 3)

you can also use a spectrum analyzer to observe this, set the analyzer to 'continuous' with 'peak hold' and you can watch as different frequencies increase in amplitude (get louder) as you change locations. 

 

Oded Kishony

 

 

1477066518_Chap_06_Labels_PRN1.pdf

Posted
59 minutes ago, Oded Kishony said:

Well, Don and I have done this dance quit a few times now.

True.  And the end is the same: 

My experience is that targeted tonal adjustments don't work well, and if they did, I would do my best to show before/after results in whatever way possible... FFT's (impact and bowed) or before/after sound clips.

We have your opinion that your method works.

Posted
10 hours ago, Oded Kishony said:

All the participants were very experienced violinmakers.

Ok.

My take on such experiments is that - sorry to be a bit direct here - the opinion of the listeners is secondary. (You could also say unimportant) They don’t have to drive the vehicle.

i think it is much more pragmatic to think 100 percent of the performer. He/she is the one who has to make an interpretation of a music piece. In this frame only the projection counts in terms of listeners perspective. All sound sound evaluations in terms of ‘beauty’ (whatever someone defines as such) can be neglected because it has more to to with interpretative skills such as artistic use of vibrato and bowing technique. 

if any, I would rather say that listeners perspective on the sound might become somehow important for the blend of instruments in small chamber groups. I have heard some chamber groups where I thought that a better blend would have improved the performance. 

Posted
2 hours ago, Don Noon said:

True.  And the end is the same: 

My experience is that targeted tonal adjustments don't work well, and if they did, I would do my best to show before/after results in whatever way possible... FFT's (impact and bowed) or before/after sound clips.

We have your opinion that your method works.

I don’t think you can see everything on an FFT. It is very good to give a kind of panoramic view of the sound. And what can be done with scraping from the outside won’t turn a bad violin  into a miraculously into a good one. Accordingly you won’t see anything in an FFT. But if you start with a good sounding instrument, I believe such alterations are able to trigger certain sound shadings and/or response which are important to musicians. 
 

Posted

I think that the way an instrument feels/responds is as important as the sound to a performer. It is tactile. Granted different players have different requirements or skill levels. Instinctively I do think there is a correlation between FFT spectra and playability. But can FFT determine how bowing variables respond when a good player is trying to change the sound? Some instruments have a lot of flexibility and others do not. Can a spectra quantify that? I would say it would be very difficult to interpret that from a chart.

Posted
13 hours ago, Andreas Preuss said:

I don’t think you can see everything on an FFT. It is very good to give a kind of panoramic view of the sound. And what can be done with scraping from the outside won’t turn a bad violin  into a miraculously into a good one. Accordingly you won’t see anything in an FFT. But if you start with a good sounding instrument, I believe such alterations are able to trigger certain sound shadings and/or response which are important to musicians. 
 

Yes!!!

I agree, you can’t change a poorly made violin into a good one, certainly not with simple external changes.

oded

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