The Perfect Violin

Okay, I've had this fiddle for a couple weeks, but it's amazing. The website copy comes off as a little hyperbolic:

designed for the highly trained player who can focus and control the power of this new model

Okay...really? Plus the "new model" is something like 15 years old, and externally at least the only difference is that it's a whole lot less ugly: here's a 2007 model, and the finish is sort of meh, and it has that funky non-traditional scroll that I assume is easier and cheaper to carve. But not mine!

I'm not 100% sure I understand the drive towards beauty in instruments. The saying goes "It should make you want to pick it up and play," and that's ultimately a shallow, aesthetic impulse. As far as I know, that striping ("curl") of the maple back and neck doesn't affect the sound: those pieces rely on uniform density and strength to do their job. Violin makers judge wood primarily by tapping it to see what sound it makes, and then secondarily by how pretty it is, because that's just what players expect. 

Does the varnish matter? It's not controversial that coating the wood in the wrong material will affect the tone: imagine encasing all these vibrating parts in something rigid like epoxy. You want it to protect the wood, which often means filling in the pores, which should be constricted anyway by letting the wood dry-cure for as long as you can stand, but maybe some of the porosity is involved in giving the wood the flex to vibrate... Applying non-invasive technology to the good instruments of any age, we're learning what makes them tick, and notwithstanding our recurring belief in a lost Golden Age (of anything), modern makers can build you an instrument that will stand toe-to-toe with a Stradivarius or a Guarneri, for $50,000 instead of $50 million.

You see how the finish is a lighter color in spots? That's antiquing to make the instrument look older than it is, a practice about as old as the expensive violins themselves. For the most part, it's not fooling anybody.

Years ago, NPR did an interview with the sound engineer at BMW who was in charge of how a BMW's door sounds and feels when you shut it. It's a recognition that our experience of an object goes far beyond its function. Consciously or not, you can tell when a door has been thought through down to small details, and that sets us up to expect a similar depth of thought in the driving experience, which hopefully the car can deliver on. And, of course, it looks pretty.

The instrument and I are still getting warmed up, but it's a keeper. I don't qualify as "highly trained" yet, and it is definitely a more advanced instrument, every bit as particular and demanding and rewarding as my reading has led me to expect.

It's not something I would have shopped for, but I have been hoping my next keeper violin would have a stripey neck.

The sound from the internal pickup really is amazing, too.

This is fun.

try again.

5-string violin #2 arrives on Monday. I have some hopes for the sound and playability both being more to my liking, with the design being specific to the purpose: 5-string violin #1 is, I suspect, an ordinary 4-string body with a properly-sized neck and fingerboard. It is lovely, but the neck feels a little chunky, I'm not sure about the bridge shape, and it has these odd moments of producing some funky tones, as though the air inside can't keep up with what the strings are doing. Nothing as awful as a wolf tone, just some odd harmonics when I don't expect them and can't explain it from what I'm playing.

A purpose-built 5-string violin.

The curved bulges there on the bottom, instead of the usual sharp corners, are borrowed from some violas, with the same goal of creating a larger acoustic chamber to give more oomph (depth, volume, timbre, etc.) to the lower notes. If I understood the seller correctly, the string spacing and neck have some tweaks to keep it from feeling chunky (as 5-string #1 often does). I'm excited about the pickup, too, since I'm experimenting with recording, and I'd be happy to have a bit less friction than I get with microphones and the poor acoustics of my office.

(I have a little gooseneck microphone, which actually captures the sound very well, but it is awkward in every way, and not as easily applied to my other instruments as I'd hoped.)

I've been wanting to order what is modernly called a "cittern" from this one particular Swedish maker, but I've been putting it off, not sure if I'd actually play the thing–although usually if I ask myself that question more than a few times, the answer is "yes."

As fate would have it, a shop in Berkeley that I was already planning to visit because of a 4-string there I really liked, has a couple of that maker's instruments, becoming the only seller in the U.S.!

As fate would further have it, we experienced some poor planning around the fact that only one of our cars is running right now, so my chiropractor-driven visit to Berkeley was canceled. So...another time!

25% more strings!

I bought a violin. Well, sort of. It's a violin. It has five (5) strings instead of four (4), which as with the rest of the violin has been pretty standard since Andrea Amati, whose grandson taught Stradivari. It combines the viola, tuned C-G-D-A, with the violin, tuned G-D-A-E, for a distinctive instrument tuned (wait for it) C-G-D-A-E. You can play violin parts, or viola parts, or just have fun.

Like most such animals, I have a 5-string violin, so called because the vibrating string ("scale") length (which determines where you have to put your fingers to play a given note) is the same as a violin. Maine luthier Jonathan Cooper, at the top of his profession, calls his version a "5-string viola" because it has a violin scale length on a viola-ish body. Just to keep everyone on their toes, Swedish fiddler Mikael Marin plays a "5-string viola" with a viola scale length, because he's a violist, and his wife Mia plays a 5-string violin like mine (if much nicer). (Adorably, their instruments are from the same extremely distinctive Swedish maker). My teacher says mine sounds like a viola with an E string, which it may, although I'm pretty sure if you play an equivalent Actual Viola™ next to it, you'll hear the difference. I asked Fiddlershop to make the E string less...piercing, since "piercing" is sort of the violin's default mode, and the E string leads the charge.

It's ridiculous. Also, lots of fun.

This may not be the final 5-string. If you don't commission one–which may lie somewhere in my future, but that will be $6,000 and up, and I am neither wealthy nor a professional player–there are only a few places to buy one, and fewer still which are not random people selling on eBay direct from China, and I identified all of them well over a year ago. Having spent a couple weeks playing the Fiddlerman one exclusively, I decided to try out one of the other sources, which is this one guy in Minneapolis (Gary) who's a sort of inventor-musician. That will be interesting, since his instruments, built in China to his design, are physically larger than the Fiddlerman one–which is a regular-sized violin, maybe with some hidden tweaks–so I'll expect the low C string to have more depth and power to it. He also spent a decade creating a custom electrical pickup that faithfully re-creates the acoustic sound: piezoelectric pickups translate the vibrations of the instrument directly into an electrical signal, unlike a microphone, which produces the signal from the vibrations of the air which has been vibrated by the instrument. This mostly frees you from feedback, but piezo pickups inevitably suck some of the life out of the sound, to the extent that there's an active market in little boxes designed to put that life back in. If you listen to the samples on Gary's website, his pickup really is amazing. In a mix with other people, there's no way anyone would notice, and folks find it good enough to record with, given you're likely to add EQ and reverb anyway.

I'll definitely keep one of them. The Fiddlerman 5-string reminds me how indifferent I am to my current rental violin. I'll get a good 4-string as well, but I have a lot of fun going around and trying instruments, which is...not what I've been doing this year. And won't really be doing in the foreseeable future, since violin shops are the sort of small, low-ceilinged spaces you don't want to be spending a couple hours during a respiratory disease pandemic. So there might just have to be a 4-string which is Better Enough™ for now.

Internally, I have labeled the 4-string goal the Froofy Violin, the kind of sound you'd want as a classical soloist rather than as a fiddler. Froofy Violins have the kind of upper register that I need to learn to use, because you can't just go along avoiding whole ranges of your instrument, or the kinds of music written for it. Even the extent to which I've learned to manage the Indifferent Rental's high notes has really helped me with the 5-string.

Pretty fun, as pandemic projects go.