Wood grounds, fillers, treatments... why bother?

[Deo Lawson]

I am not an expert maker by any means, simply an enthusiast and a hobbyist who is mulling over some ideas.

That said, I have been thinking a lot about the various pre-varnish treatments that makers seem to obsessively fuss over, myself included in the past. Vernice bianca, plaster of paris, cooked colophony in turpentine, and other such "in the wood" preparations. I am starting to feel like all these things are a bit of a waste of time and actually a detriment to the sound.

If a high stiffness to weight ratio is desirable, then these preparations are in violation of that principle. From my own tests on spruce blanks I have found many of these preparations to significantly increase the weight of the wood without making any major improvement to its stiffness, thus lowering the resonant frequency of the blank.

Now I was thinking, as a beginner on the drums, about the vibration of drumheads and cymbals. Drummers will know that even a miniscule addition of a couple grams to any of the heads or the cymbals will introduce a significant damping effect, which occasionally is needed but not always desirable in tonally speaking. In the case of a violin I think that excessive ringing is not usually an issue, but slow response often is. Imagine adding oil, or resin, or egg white to a drumhead... you would get a dead and thumpy drum. Likewise I vividly recall visiting a maker who used a coat of linseed oil to seal both sides of their plates and thinking that their instruments sounded like they were stuffed with socks.

You might say I am too focused on stiffness to weight, but as someone primarily interested in making 5 string acoustic violins, achieving violin-like response and brightness becomes a primary issue.

I don't really have a thesis for this post, but all this was just to say: why not just leave the wood alone? I am unsure if any additions will improve the sound, but I do know for sure that many of them can make it worse.

[jezzupe]

I think there's a certain amount of damping that is helpful, best noticed when playing varnish violins you played in the white, there is a certain mellowness induced though the "wrapper".

Then there are optics such as Joe Robson's varnish

And my oil blocking super thin super light sugar seal which does an optical thing also

and with some instruments like guitars grain filling is generally desired , so again kinda a visual thing.

I do think that straight to oil can work but probably works better with a wax free shellac seal

but really it's all just opinions I suppose mixed with some empirical results based on a consensus of opinions , so do what you like , there are no rules that will usher in the violin police....yet, well at least until Monday where we will all be considered guilty until proven innocent

[JacksonMaberry]

I just don't like having color varnish get into my wood, which looks bad and sounds bad. So I seal with something. I also feel I get a better look faster if my wood has some color before varnish (not to mention when the varnish wears, it doesn't expose glaring white wood beneath which, to my eye, looks bad. 

So sealing/sizing/grounding makes sense to me optically, aesthetically, and acoustically. 

Granted, a bad ground or a good ground inexpertly applied can do more harm than good. 

 

[iNeedAnswers]

More generally than specific about this question, as I have only ever made a single crappy violin myself and I am in no position to discuss details of making:

I think the idea, to create a violin, that resonates as good as possible is the wrong approach, hence I think the highest stiffness to weight ratio is not necessarily desirable. 

From my understanding violins are just as much about dampening than it is about making them ring. 

This has to do with balance of overtones, but also with range. Violins that are too easy to play, are only resonant, don't allow any color range and only little dynamic range. As a player, I want my violin to do what I make it do, not that it hops onto the same sound at any small touch of the bow. 

[jezzupe]

In my opinion you really don't want to get too hung up on any one thing,method or ideology, but to simply build as many as possible so as to be able to have minor experimentation and deviations from what you "physically" did previously, in order to hash out what works and what does not, to keep the good, get rid of the bad all the while getting as much feedback from players to gain some consensus about what you are doing and if "things" are even noticeable to them, not just you . 

It's very easy to get in some "ritual bubble" that you swear "works" great or some "thing" you are doing that you think helps when it really doesn't , you just think it does.

I think getting exposure to players, the higher the caliber the better,the more the better, is perhaps the most important "luxury" a violin maker can get and is perhaps the most important "thing" a maker can do in order to not only improve, but to also eventually sell their work.

Besides being a good student in your own class, the most important thing you can do is get your violins in players hands

Many people do this in a bubble alone and do not have the benefit of feedback, it is imperative to hunt down players that you can befriend in order to take things to "next levels"

Look at Strad, he was always evolving, I think that lots of that was coming from constructive criticism he was getting from friends and clients who played mixed with his own empirical observations about his own work and modifications

[LCF]

5 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

, I have been thinking a lot about the various pre-varnish treatments that makers seem to obsessively fuss over, myself included in the past. Vernice bianca, plaster of paris, cooked colophony in turpentine, and other such "in the wood" preparations. I am starting to feel like all these things are a bit of a waste of time and actually a detriment to the sound.

 

I think it's necessary to seal/protect spruce somehow at a minimum. I have made and worked with other types of instruments which are left bare and they get messy very quickly. Violin is up close and personal too, more likely to get mucked about.  

 

5 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

Now I was thinking, as a beginner on the drums, about the vibration of drumheads and cymbals. Drummers will know that even a miniscule addition of a couple grams to any of the heads or the cymbals will introduce a significant damping effect, which occasionally is needed but not always desirable in tonally speaking.

It's very easy to confuse mass with damping but they are quite different. 

Putting mass in the middle of a tight drumhead lowers the pitch of the main resonance and any others which have high vibration at that point. The Indian tabla rely on mass added like this to tune the heads and make the drums ring, also to bring tge normally inharmonic resonance modes into tune with each other. The details involve rice paste as a glue and iron oxides or filings and other secret combinations for weight.  I suspect it's done in such a way as to not have much effect on damping. 

 

Violin has lots of 'peaky', resonant responses --- the width of any peak is related mostly to damping with more damping giving a wider peak which might be important in order to even out the response, to make things a bit less 'wolfy'. 

[David Burgess]

6 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

If a high stiffness to weight ratio is desirable, then these preparations are in violation of that principle. From my own tests on spruce blanks I have found many of these preparations to significantly increase the weight of the wood without making any major improvement to its stiffness, thus lowering the resonant frequency of the blank.

If you don't use some sort of isolator, and the varnish soaks into the wood, isn't that going to be bad too?

[LCF]

2 hours ago, iNeedAnswers said:

More generally than specific about this question, as I have only ever made a single crappy violin myself and I am in no position to discuss details of making:

I think the idea, to create a violin, that resonates as good as possible is the wrong approach, hence I think the highest stiffness to weight ratio is not necessarily desirable. 

From my understanding violins are just as much about dampening than it is about making them ring. 

This has to do with balance of overtones, but also with range. Violins that are too easy to play, are only resonant, don't allow any color range and only little dynamic range. As a player, I want my violin to do what I make it do, not that it hops onto the same sound at any small touch of the bow. 

Something which amazes me is just how efficient a radiator of sound a violin is, they can be painfully loud. It's an extraordinarily efficient system. 

[iNeedAnswers]

True, the violin can be incredible loud. 

[Deo Lawson]

To be clear, I'm not contesting the use of a sealer on the outside surface. That can obviously be necessary if you have a very thin or slow drying varnish. What I'm puzzling over is the pursuit of some "secret recipe" that can be lathered all over both sides of the plates to somehow increase the natural resonant characteristics of the wood.

[JacksonMaberry]

1 hour ago, Deo Lawson said:

To be clear, I'm not contesting the use of a sealer on the outside surface. That can obviously be necessary if you have a very thin or slow drying varnish. What I'm puzzling over is the pursuit of some "secret recipe" that can be lathered all over both sides of the plates to somehow increase the natural resonant characteristics of the wood.

I don't personally know anyone who pursues that goal, but I'm sure you're right in that they're out there. 

[Marty Kasprzyk]

6 hours ago, LCF said:

Something which amazes me is just how efficient a radiator of sound a violin is, they can be painfully loud. It's an extraordinarily efficient system. 

According to Cremer (1)The violin's radiated sound power is about 6mW compared to the bowing input power of 150mW so the efficiency is only about 4 % which is a poor efficiency.

 

1. Lothar Cremer "The Physics of the Violin", The MIT Press, 1984, Chapter 9.1 

[Victor Roman]

14 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

I don't really have a thesis for this post, but all this was just to say: why not just leave the wood alone? I am unsure if any additions will improve the sound, but I do know for sure that many of them can make it worse.

Here is what I noticed from my  personal experience : I own quite a few violins, most of them very indifferent and three violins which have some form of wood treatment under the "main" varnish. A hard layer of something. They sound "better" than all my other violins. They are much louder, they carry more, the tone is more open. I knew the makers of two of them and they intended that outcome and used some sort of layer for that purpose. The third violin seems to have a layer of extremely fine sand under the varnish and it is as loud as the other two albeit being less open in character. I used this violin a lot over a long period and one thing I noticed is that it's tone tends to be less variable with humidity and temperature. ( I used to play a lot of quartet and that was a big bonus ). I have some ( foggy ) experience with violins made by East European makers, varnished with spirit varnish made from copal or shellac or a mixture of shellac and propolis. To my taste the shellac sounded very well , the propolis mix was too mellow and the copal gave a harsh character after a few years. Where am I going with all this ? Well, I suspect some makers do not leave the wood alone because the are looking for a certain kind of tone and a certain kind of .... "driveability" they do not get from varnish alone . Some players might want a very flexible violin and some might want a stiffer one. Some want open tone, some want mellow etc.  It is clear to me that the composition of the varnish influences both the tone and the "driveability" and if I am to trust a fairly limited sample, the under-varnish does, too. 

Of course, one question is how good are makers at understanding violin tone. With a couple of rare exceptions my experience in that direction was pretty much abysmal. Most makers I met ( in Europe ) did not play or played at 2nd grade level. Some were positively tone deaf.   

[Victor Roman]

1 hour ago, Marty Kasprzyk said:

According to Cremer (1)The violin's radiated sound power is about 6mW compared to the bowing input power of 150mW so the efficiency is only about 4 % which is a poor efficiency.

 

1. Lothar Cremer "The Physics of the Violin", The MIT Press, 1984, Chapter 9.1 

I have some minor familiarity with audio amps : that figure sounds way too small to me. 150mW won't cut through an orchestra. What sort of "mW" are those ? Could you please explain ?

[Deo Lawson]

14 minutes ago, Victor Roman said:

Here is what I noticed from my  personal experience : I own quite a few violins, most of them very indifferent and three violins which have some form of wood treatment under the "main" varnish. A hard layer of something. They sound "better" than all my other violins. They are much louder, they carry more, the tone is more open. I knew the makers of two of them and they intended that outcome and used some sort of layer for that purpose. The third violin seems to have a layer of extremely fine sand under the varnish and it is as loud as the other two albeit being less open in character. I used this violin a lot over a long period and one thing I noticed is that it's tone tends to be less variable with humidity and temperature. ( I used to play a lot of quartet and that was a big bonus ). I have some ( foggy ) experience with violins made by East European makers, varnished with spirit varnish made from copal or shellac or a mixture of shellac and propolis. To my taste the shellac sounded very well , the propolis mix was too mellow and the copal gave a harsh character after a few years. Where am I going with all this ? Well, I suspect some makers do not leave the wood alone because the are looking for a certain kind of tone and a certain kind of .... "driveability" they do not get from varnish alone . Some players might want a very flexible violin and some might want a stiffer one. Some want open tone, some want mellow etc.  It is clear to me that the composition of the varnish influences both the tone and the "driveability" and if I am to trust a fairly limited sample, the under-varnish does, too. 

Of course, one question is how good are makers at understanding violin tone. With a couple of rare exceptions my experience in that direction was pretty much abysmal. Most makers I met ( in Europe ) did not play or played at 2nd grade level. Some were positively tone deaf.   

Very interesting. This is the sort of thing I am wondering about.

[JacksonMaberry]

2 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

Very interesting. This is the sort of thing I am wondering about.

I wouldn't put too much stock in that. There is zero effort to control for variables, and all of those assertions are subjective at best and unfalsifiable. 

[Andreas Preuss]

18 hours ago, Deo Lawson said:

I am not an expert maker by any means, simply an enthusiast and a hobbyist who is mulling over some ideas.

That said, I have been thinking a lot about the various pre-varnish treatments that makers seem to obsessively fuss over, myself included in the past. Vernice bianca, plaster of paris, cooked colophony in turpentine, and other such "in the wood" preparations. I am starting to feel like all these things are a bit of a waste of time and actually a detriment to the sound.

If a high stiffness to weight ratio is desirable, then these preparations are in violation of that principle. From my own tests on spruce blanks I have found many of these preparations to significantly increase the weight of the wood without making any major improvement to its stiffness, thus lowering the resonant frequency of the blank.

Now I was thinking, as a beginner on the drums, about the vibration of drumheads and cymbals. Drummers will know that even a miniscule addition of a couple grams to any of the heads or the cymbals will introduce a significant damping effect, which occasionally is needed but not always desirable in tonally speaking. In the case of a violin I think that excessive ringing is not usually an issue, but slow response often is. Imagine adding oil, or resin, or egg white to a drumhead... you would get a dead and thumpy drum. Likewise I vividly recall visiting a maker who used a coat of linseed oil to seal both sides of their plates and thinking that their instruments sounded like they were stuffed with socks.

You might say I am too focused on stiffness to weight, but as someone primarily interested in making 5 string acoustic violins, achieving violin-like response and brightness becomes a primary issue.

I don't really have a thesis for this post, but all this was just to say: why not just leave the wood alone? I am unsure if any additions will improve the sound, but I do know for sure that many of them can make it worse.

I don’t honk you can compare a drum with a violin to make conclusions about the wood treatment. 
 

while the drum gets an ‘energy impact’ only once, the ‘energy impact’ on a violin is permanently supported by the bowing. Another major difference is that a drum has to reproduce only one frequency, its own, the violin any frequency which is coming from the bowed string and a sort of forced onto the sound box.
 

Especially the second point is important for the ground as the ground can even out too strong resonances relative to weak resonances. Reason good enough to sacrifice a bit of averaged overall sound power. 
 

Acoustics aside, the right reflective ground looks aesthetically like a small miracle and is for this reason also important. It’s like high class dish where the eye eats as well. 
 

——————

Artistically one might ask the question if the aesthetic of a varnish system developed 300 years ago is still valid today. As long as we reproduce the same models certainly: yes. 
 

————-

Edit: another thing is that a good ground is the necessary condition to make the varnish really ultra thin, which seems to be to the major factor for damping. Only a ground which is ‘goey’ will dampen too much. Such as propolis, or non drying oils, proposed by some people who have found the ‘secret’. 

Edited April 28, 2024 by Andreas Preuss
Add a comment

[Don Noon]

19 hours ago, jezzupe said:

I think there's a certain amount of damping that is helpful, best noticed when playing varnish violins you played in the white, there is a certain mellowness induced...

19 hours ago, JacksonMaberry said:

I just don't like having color varnish get into my wood, which looks bad and sounds bad.

The two issues are damping and visual aesthetics.

You aren't going to improve stiffness/weight with a coating, at least with anything "normal".  Wood is good, polymers not so much.

I used to play all of my violins int-the-white first before varnishing them, and they have a distinctive raspy, fuzzy, harsh sound to them.  Perhaps it would be ideal if you wanted to use it for a drum.  I recall at least once during competition tone testing at VMAAI (where I don't look at the player), I thought to myself, "That viiolin sounds unvarnished!"  I looked, and it wasn't varnished.  In my acoustic testing, it is mainly the higher frequencies that get attenuated.  Mode frequencies only change a little.  So it's damping; some is good.  Too much is not better.  Linseed oil is quite high in damping; I find that an oil-free first coat followed by a thin oil varnish works best.

Aesthetically, too much color in the first coating is blotchy and not good, but a tiny bit of colir looks best to me.

[Victor Roman]

1 hour ago, JacksonMaberry said:

I wouldn't put too much stock in that. There is zero effort to control for variables, and all of those assertions are subjective at best and unfalsifiable. 

I believe you labor under the misapprehension that I intended to present some sort of scientific theory and wish to assure you that was not the case. I simply related "what I noticed from my  personal experience". There was no intention on my side to generalize and nothing I wrote would be "falsifiable" within the context. You might've also noticed that I avoided any hearsay and I could have mentioned lots of it...  To my personal knowledge the European maker with the largest number of violins in the hands of top musicians, Concert Masters, Conservatory Professors, Quartet leaders, Soloists etc is Maestro Roger Hargrave. He has explained at some length his rationale for using a Plaster of Paris layer under his varnish, one of the reasons being a net improvement in tonal volume and quality. Probably the reason Hargave violins can be heard in major concertos with top orchestras and commercial DG recordings. Of course, I respect your opinion - what I actually object to is this little thing : "and all of those assertions are subjective".  On the one hand I made no assertions and on the other, if you haven't figured out that violin stuff is all subjective almost by definition, you have a problem. 

[Victor Roman]

21 minutes ago, Don Noon said:

I used to play all of my violins int-the-white first before varnishing them, and they have a distinctive raspy, fuzzy, harsh sound to them. 

This somehow parallels my experience decades ago when we used to go to Reghin in Romania and select violins we later would take to the West, to sell. However, I read that there are famous Stradivarius violins with almost no varnish left and they still sound "like a Strad". What might explain that, if indeed true ?

[LCF]

6 hours ago, Marty Kasprzyk said:

According to Cremer (1)The violin's radiated sound power is about 6mW compared to the bowing input power of 150mW so the efficiency is only about 4 % which is a poor efficiency.

 

1. Lothar Cremer "The Physics of the Violin", The MIT Press, 1984, Chapter 9.1 

It always feels like more work than a dim light bulb!

 

I think that is more than typical voice output power which also has similar inefficiency wrt effort needed to produce vs actual output. Filtering is inefficient and  the problem with all the damp airways, is damping. 

 

The only power figures for voice I could find on the interwebs in a quick search suggest less than 1mW, actually they say 60dB at 3 feet. Which dB though, and whose voice and feet?

[JacksonMaberry]

25 minutes ago, Victor Roman said:

I believe you labor under the misapprehension that I intended to present some sort of scientific theory and wish to assure you that was not the case. I simply related "what I noticed from my  personal experience". There was no intention on my side to generalize and nothing I wrote would be "falsifiable" within the context. You might've also noticed that I avoided any hearsay and I could have mentioned lots of it...  To my personal knowledge the European maker with the largest number of violins in the hands of top musicians, Concert Masters, Conservatory Professors, Quartet leaders, Soloists etc is Maestro Roger Hargrave. He has explained at some length his rationale for using a Plaster of Paris layer under his varnish, one of the reasons being a net improvement in tonal volume and quality. Probably the reason Hargave violins can be heard in major concertos with top orchestras and commercial DG recordings. Of course, I respect your opinion - what I actually object to is this little thing : "and all of those assertions are subjective".  On the one hand I made no assertions and on the other, if you haven't figured out that violin stuff is all subjective almost by definition, you have a problem. 

No problems, I assure you. I do think the assertion, which you certainly just made, that Hargrave's fiddles are successful "probably" because of the plaster ground is patently ridiculous and unprovable. It could just as easily be his keen understanding of his materials, of arching geometry, or any of hundreds of other factors considered by fine makers. 

I don't have anything against you personally, but I always bristle at the hollow fluff people say with such authority on the matter of fiddles, especially when they haven't made any/many and put their names behind them for the professional musicians of the world. 

[Marty Kasprzyk]

27 minutes ago, LCF said:

It always feels like more work than a dim light bulb!

 

I think that is more than typical voice output power which also has similar inefficiency wrt effort needed to produce vs actual output. Filtering is inefficient and  the problem with all the damp airways, is damping. 

 

The only power figures for voice I could find on the interwebs in a quick search suggest less than 1mW, actually they say 60dB at 3 feet. Which dB though, and whose voice and feet?

The "Springer Handbook of Acoustics", Thomas D. Rossing editor, 2007 in chapter 19.2 'Hearing and Sound Production' says:

"nearly all sound-production mechanisms, ranging from animals through musical instruments to electrially driven loudspeakers, are quite inefficient with a rtio of radiated acoustic power to input power of not much more than 1%, and often a good deal less than this."

"The loudest known bird is the common rooster Gallus domesticus with a output during crowing of 200mW."

 I've never compared my violas or violins against a rooster but it might be something to crow about.

[jezzupe]

1 hour ago, Victor Roman said:

I believe you labor under the misapprehension that I intended to present some sort of scientific theory and wish to assure you that was not the case. I simply related "what I noticed from my  personal experience". There was no intention on my side to generalize and nothing I wrote would be "falsifiable" within the context. You might've also noticed that I avoided any hearsay and I could have mentioned lots of it...  To my personal knowledge the European maker with the largest number of violins in the hands of top musicians, Concert Masters, Conservatory Professors, Quartet leaders, Soloists etc is Maestro Roger Hargrave. He has explained at some length his rationale for using a Plaster of Paris layer under his varnish, one of the reasons being a net improvement in tonal volume and quality. Probably the reason Hargave violins can be heard in major concertos with top orchestras and commercial DG recordings. Of course, I respect your opinion - what I actually object to is this little thing : "and all of those assertions are subjective".  On the one hand I made no assertions and on the other, if you haven't figured out that violin stuff is all subjective almost by definition, you have a problem. 

Was that not a double bass instrument that he detailed his accounts of "tone improvement"? if so I don't think we are comparing apples to apples. Fwiw I like POP

[Don Noon]

1 hour ago, Victor Roman said:

I read that there are famous Stradivarius violins with almost no varnish left and they still sound "like a Strad". What might explain that, if indeed true ?

I doubt that any Strads are left with mostly bare wood and nothing on it.  I can accept that there are many Strads with almost no original varnish, but there's going to be some french polish or something put on for protection.  That still does something acoustically.  And maybe that's the Strad secret .