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Fluted Viola in Poplar

Year: 2024
Materials:

Back: Poplar
Top: Italian Spruce,
Neck: Baltic Maple

Finish:

Antiqued oil varnish

Dimensions:

Body length: 363 (15 3/4″)
Bouts: 188, 135, 234
Ribs including plates:44 at top block, 46 at lower block
String length: 363
Stop: 213

 

Notes:

This is a version of my “Del Gesu” Model viola.  There are no extant Del Gesu violas, perhaps he never made any, but I imagined what one might have looked like if he had.

The tooling on the surface is a little more extreme than even DG felt comfortable leaving. I feel that it is  more in line with post nineteenth century sculptural aesthetics.

The sound of the viola is  surprisingly normal, as I have found with my other Off-Beat instruments.  It is possible that the surface fluting may actually help the tone: the plate  graduations seen on classic master instruments are notoriously irregular compared to the majority of modern day copies.  Unexciting graduations = unexciting tone?

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