In part 1 of this post I discussed the ideas behind the hybrid "Tabolin". The instrument is part violin, part tabla drum and will feature tunable, resonant panels of velum in the body. I hope that the fiddle will have will have playing qualities similar to a Viola...
Following on from earlier experimental fiddles I’ve been thinking of making a violin with very thin areas or cells in the upper and lower bouts. This has led to the idea of a violin with many drum like panels.
Carving the plates Carving the plates for the X and O fiddles was fairly straight forward. The basic design of the plates is "strong in the middle with thinner areas in the upper and lower bouts". The plates ended up with thicknesses in the bouts that ranged...
When I presented the first two unusual fiddles on social media people naturally wanted to know how they sound. Here they are compared to two instruments of the same model, dimensions and wood. Make your own judgement, but to me they sound quite normal, I think that...
Longtime violin-maker Andrew Carruthers has struck on an idea: that perhaps new violins can be inspired by something other than old violins.
Not that the San Francisco Bay-area luthier has any problem with old violins — he’s studied the great masters and reveres their work. In fact, he’s made hundreds of stringed instruments based on Guarneri del Gesùs, Stradivaris, Montaganas and more.
But these days he also has been looking to nature, geometry, architecture for inspiration in his instrument-making.
In part 1, I described a plan to make a pair of violins with structural features that I think will have effects on the way those instruments sound. I decided to base the designs for the two violins around two of the vibrational modes that have been studied and used as tools by many violinmakers in an attempt to control the tonal qualities of our instruments. This second part describes the designs that I came up with for the two fiddles I intend to build.
The idea of "Cellular Fiddles" has evolved out of two earlier projects. The Dimpled Viola made a feature of some of the visually interesting rough carving of a violin that normally get lost in the finished instrument. The Turtle Fiddle which took one of the visual...
This is a follow up to the Dimpled Viola project and develops some of the ideas sparked by that project. With the viola I made an instrument that made a feature of the gouge work that appears in early stages of carving an instrument but that normally gets completely...
In the first part of this study I constructed a viola emphasizing a part of the construction process, the carving, which is visually very interesting but that most players never get to see. In this second part, I consider the surface finish and explore the decorative...
My father was a sculptor who worked in everything from marble and bronze to sintered sand and telegraph poles. in some of his wood carving he used similar techniques to some that I've ended up using in violin making. Whereas I would be obliged to lose all traces of...