A collection of instruments for tonal and aesthetic exploration. This began as a Covid project. I'd long wanted to make an instrument that showed off some of the the attractive stages that the violin goes through during the construction process. The Dimpled Viola made...
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.
This is so gratifying! Thanks to every one who has been involved, this is far from a solo effort. You can get a digital version of the Strings story. Also read more about the project on The Redwood Violin Website Earlier Press The project also received local press...
On January 1st this year I effectively quit my violinmaking day job and devoted myself fulltime to the Redwood Violin Project. The idea was to make a violin, from scratch, using only materials from within 25 miles of my house. I asked for help with making the violin...
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...