Violin Forum/Message Board

[murrayatuptown]

Hello:

I have a rather unfocused interest in violin-making.

At one point I had wished to acquire a Stew-Mac violin kit and put the effort into graduating the plates carefully etc. That got pushed aside by simply buying a couple violins for our daughter.

I have been reading about tap tuning and Chladni plates and have an 'Open Plate Tuning' DVD from Alan Caruth, who makes both violins and guitars. It specifically deals with flat guitar tops, with tone bars & braces already attached.

I read in a white paper that Chladni tuning of violin plates in difficult because of the arching, but I thought that was the first reference I found to Chladni... I could be wrong.

Well, when I saw the Savart trapezoidal violin, I was very intrigued because it is essentially flat, and well, because it was different, and a huge step up from an abominable cigar box violin.

So I found a copy of the Ronald Roberts book "Making a Simple Violin and Viola", not realizing it specifically was about the trapezoidal design.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61VPWpPxDNL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I guess that's luck, or 'uck', if you don't like the design!

I'm wondering if anyone has ever constructed one of these.

It may help me to view other instrument drawings, but the drawings in this book remind me of naval architecture plans for ships. I would find those equally confusing.

I hoped I'd find someone who could explain a little. I found a local luthier who already answered a huge array of questions for me this weekend, but I'd like to begin to understand on my own.

Thank you

[Michael Darnton]

You may be getting a lot of people looking and none responding because the direction you're going in has pretty much been proven to be a dead end. The idea that the parts of a musical instrument should themselves be musical is a concept that's put violin making back 150 years from where it should be by now. There's absolutely no evidence that the old guys did it that way, and not any theory from their time that would have even made it possible.
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[ctviolin]

[murrayatuptown]

For Michael:

Maybe I don't understand your statement about parts of an instrument being musical. I assumed that was referring to tapping the top and back and listening to the tones as one removes material, but I think my limited knowledge led me to the only thing that seemed analogous. (Coming back to this intro after reading my entire response, I don't mean it to sound contradictory - what I know is very little, so I'm trying to understand better).

I didn't read the entire book yet, but I thought it was a bit sparse on 'voicing' (again I hope I'm using the right term).

Could you please explain? Which part takes one too far away from current wisdom?

I know the idea of analysis of tapped tones of nearly every part of an instrument is something Lloyd Loar introduced to Gibson, 1920 or so, but it apparently fell out of favor after several years. I don't know if mandolin luthiery is close enough to generalize.

For both Michael and Craig:

Accepting that a finished self-made 'trap-o-lin' may only be step above a cigar box krap-o-lin, I'm still curious if it wouldn't serve as a stepping stone to learning to carve and listen to tapped tones during progressive modification to the wood. I'm not ready to jump right to carving arched tops and backs yet, but probably would like to if I ever had the time.

Working with flattish plates appears less intimidating and applicable experience-wise to guitars. It also seems fairly easy to get started with vs. a traditional violin shape, from the standpoint of the arched shape having presumably greater risk of ruin (less chance of beginner's luck, and less costly). A barely 'playable' trapezoid at least has little reputation to uphold. There is an overabundance of terrible violins made by people with sufficient training to do better, leading me to conclude the success rate for a beginning arched traditional violin project is likely to be low...

Thank you

[Chet Bishop]

Actually, for those willing to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, the success rate is amazingly high...their instruments look pretty respectable, and play amazingly well.

But the key is in all caps, above. If you decide to wander off the beaten path, the quality of the result will be inversely proportional to how far off you wandered.

I am not referring to the tiny details of workmanship that define a fine violin. I am simply saying that some terrible examples of "first violin" actually play pretty well. I know a man who has built two (count 'em, two) instruments-- a violin (#1) and a cello (#2). that "first violin" is being played in a local orchestra by a "first violinist" who realllly wants to buy that violin, but the maker won't sell, as it is his first try; the cello is being played in that same orchestra by the maker...and it is a very good cello. This man built both by following the instructions given by Henry Strobel, in his books, with a little guidance fromme. And I am by no means an expert.

So, I'd say, if you want to build a good violin, and are willing to follow directions, AND willing to learn, as a neophyte, how to sharpen tools, bend wood, carve wood, etc. then, yes you can do it.

Just my opinion. You've got plenty of help available here on this forum.[/b]
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[Michael Darnton]

In the past I've been pretty negative about any kind of tuning, understanding that the great Cremonese makers definitely couldn't have done it, but now that I understand what it does to a violin's sound, that negativity has become even deeper: tuning is evil.

Tuning encourages a violin to vibrate in certain ways, contrary to the potential and variable wishes of the player. That's fine for people who can't play and need the violin to make the right sound for them (whatever the "right" sound is, and no one seems to be able to figure that part out) but for a player who can play, it's like giving an organist a one-stop organ, with that one stop labeled "What I the maker, in my omnipotent genius, have decided is the sound you should make--all the other voices you could have had on this organ, I have decided they are wrong, and you shall not have them".
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[cmkaco]

Mr. Darnton,

I don't make violins, but archtop guitars, which are based on the violin. I have tried tap tuning the top plate, but I just don't think my ears (or any of the expensive equipment I have tried) are sensitive enough to tell the difference between one note and another.

So, your comments are very interesting to me, as I am always striving to build the best instrument I can. If the classical makers did not tap tune, then what did they do to make sure they had the best sound? Did they strive for a certain flexibility in the plate? If so, how did they know when it was flexible enough - was it just trial and error (too much flexibility and the sound was no good so they replaced the top)? Or was it purely thicknesses, which I have noticed violin makers seem to relish recording - and I don't know why, since a certain thickness on one piece of wood means nothing when you have a different piece of wood, and how did they determine the ideal thicknesses?

[Michael Darnton]

There are a couple of things to think about. First, bowed instruments don't have a whole lot in common with plucked ones. For a start, they almost never get plucked, and depend on dealing with constant input, with bowing.

Talking about the old guys, one thing that people ignore is that old graduations vary wildly, both within the same instrument, and from one instrument to another. There are violins with tops in the 2.2mm range that behave fine, and ones with tops 50% thicker, that do differently but also fine. Second, many older violins have been seriously messed with: they have patches, repairs, been scraped, and often totally regraduated. If there was a secret involving micro graduation, it's been scraped away. . . . and still they're the greatest violins ever made.

So if you take all that into consideration, carefully executed graduation is obviously not magic. What you do notice is that overall thicknesses affect the way instruments behave, but the differences in grads have to be huge differences, not tiny scapings here and there. The second thing is that after a while it becomes apparent that gross thickness changes in certain places affect behaviors in certain ways. I'm going to say that this isn't because of what we think of as "tuning" but because these change the way the pieces vibrate in large-scale ways.

My current model is that arching is most important for response--that if the arching is good, you can make a violin thick or thin and it can still be responsive and good. Then graduation can change things like power curve and complexity of sound.

For the last few years I've been experimenting with graduation, getting wilder and wilder, on many type of violins--not only my own, but well made factory ones. The one thing I am absolutely certain of is that graduation does not have the type of importance that people attribute to it, and that arching is much, MUCH more important.

What has made graduation appear to be important is the fact that if a violin is improperly arched, making it thinner will always make it move easier, freeing it up, and that is always considered better by players. Everyone who "tunes" does it by removing wood which, if their arch isn't perfect. . . and it never is because most makers refuse to use templates for arching because of some hubristic notion that their eyes can't sin, even though they can't do the same thing twice . . . makes a violin work better.
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[cmkaco]

Thanks. Lots of thoughts to consider, and process. Your input is always appreciated.

[pmccombs]

[pmccombs]

[Michael Darnton]

A lot of makers are resistant to them. It's like the only thing on a violin they think they can do by eye. They don't understand that the violin is, from one end to another, designed and drafted, and there's no reason the original designer would have neglected to design the arching as well, and this, like the rest, should be discoverable.

In fact, the arch does turn out to be very specific, in a way that's hard to grasp unless you start getting into the math of it and how it affects the various cross arches in ways that are apparently ever changing, yet maintain both mathematical integrity, but also (more importantly) correspond exactly with the strange arching changes we see in the original Cremonese instruments. The effect, I believe, is to create surfaces that move homogeneously, rather than having various parts working against their neighbors
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[pmccombs]

Do you have any advice on the use of templates? For example, how many are needed? How do you design them? I saw one maker who uses a chain suspended between two pins, but I'm not sure if that will make a cycloid sort of arc or not. I've used the disk method in the past, but it was kind of hard to get it right. I've got a link to some software to try too.

And what about top templates vs. back templates?

[Michael Darnton]

A chain doesn't make the recurve. The inflection point of the curve from convex to concave is a crucial part of it. I started with the curves on the Strad mag posters, and fed their heights and widths into cycloid generating software to give me the idealized, curves, undistorted by time, for those violins, but now I use a method that's much more complex that accounts for the distortion of the long arches and any twisting of the body. That first step was a great improvement in my results, thought.

The software is here: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/ccycloid/

If you want to learn the whole process, you should come to my summer workshop, where we work through the whole thing from beginning to end.

I use five cross templates, but the last summer Sam Ray Compton attended my workshop he was making a back with a template for ever cm of length--35 of them-- and it was looking really perfect!
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[pmccombs]