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This is the varnish close, but not quite at, its final form. I should probably talk about the fact that I decided to antique this violin, that is go for a varnish look that simulates the wear of a well loved violin over time. As to the whys and wherefores of antiquing…It’s an aesthetic choice that overlaps and interacts with a marketing choice that is shaped both by cheaper new instruments and expensive old instruments and the recent history of higher end new instruments. It’s not usually my thing, but this time I wanted to give it a go just to see if I could. I think it turned out ok. (And hopefully you agree!) I don’t think I’ll be doing it again any time soon to be honest. I like violins that look friendly—so not the scary sharp look of the perfect new instrument—but violins that still embrace the fact that they are new and modern. But it’s fun to experiment and to remember and be inspired by what else it out there sometimes too. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #varnish
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#throwbackthursday to that time in violin making school that I left for a workshop and came back to find my whiteboard had become a luscious landscape for a blinged out Bach. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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In real life this violin is actually all done an strung up. But my social media life is experiencing a bit of a lag. And since we are about the process here as much as the final result I’m going to keep posting work-in-progress photos. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #varnish
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I’m still busy with preparations for my move to Barcelona but I realized I had still had some unshared photos that I could post in the mean time. To be honest, I don’t remember what I wanted to say about his bassbar. I often don’t really know what to think about bassbars. I can tell you in general terms what they do and how they contribute to the acoustics of the final instrument. But, when it comes to the nitty-gritty details a lot of it is craft-knowledge that has been passed down from one maker to the next. I’m not sure that having a more “scientific” understanding of how bassbars work would actually help me make a better violin, though. The craft approach works well here. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Just a quick varnish update. This is getting quite close to its final form. I have some more I want to say about the process but that’s going to have to wait till next week when I have more time to sit down and type it all out. Enjoy your weekend y’all! #varnish #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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#ThrowBackThursday to me carving out the top of my very first violin back at the North Bennet Street School! #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Seeing my label peek through a newly varnished instrument is always good for my ego. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Books are some of my favorite tools. It would be difficult to learn violin making, and probably any craft, from books alone. But my small collection has certainly help inform and guide my work. Some are general history and music history books to better understand the world of 17th and 18th century makers. Some are general woodworking / craft technique books or violin making & repair specific technique books. And the last group are violin reference books full of photos and specifications of historical instruments. Some of the books I still aspire to having at my disposal will possibly end up being the most expensive tools I own! #tooltuesday #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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I don’t always cover my plates in a dense scrawl of codes and hieroglyphics while carving them out. But, sometimes, sketching out contour lines to show the variation in thickness helps me keep track of where I am and where I am going, especially as I continue to explore this new (to me) model. I am not aiming for specific thicknesses at every point. I have a range of thicknesses in mind and a general pattern of where I want more material and where I want less. As I work I am mostly paying attention to three things: overall weight, stiffness/flexibility, and thickness. These all correlate and influence each other, but not in any simple linear fashion. Removing wood—and this process is only ever subtractive!—always affects all three at once. The nature of the wood, the shape of the outline, the curvature of the arching, the relative thickness in other areas, etc. all come into play. As I get closer to my initial concept I make smaller and smaller adjustments, trying to maneuver all the parameters into place. At the end it’s only my judgement, informed by a close reading of the material and the specific piece in front of me, that can tell me when I’m done…and as always there is no guarantee that I’m right! #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Both the top and back plate have been carved now. Next I will flip them over and hollow out the inside. At this point I have only very limited confirmation about how the final instrument will sound. I will be able to make further adjustments down the road with the thicknesses, ff-holes, bass-bar, and set up. But, a lot is already set by the curvature and shape of these archings. Normally I would be ok with that, because I would have past experiences to draw on. This, however, is my first time making this particular model so I don’t have the same confidence as I might otherwise. I brought different ways of looking, general knowledge of acoustics, historical insight of Cremonese instruments, and craft know-how about how violins are made and work all to bear on my work so I wasn’t flying blind…but I’m already looking forward to the next time I make this model and I’ll know and understand just a little bit more about this particular beast. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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#ThrowBackThursday to that time I explained violin making to a bunch of preschoolers. We had such a blast! #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Varnish has a tricky habit of looking very different under different light. What looks perfect in one space can look horridly dark or awfully pale or just odd in another. It’s important to constantly check how you’re doing in different environments. You want the instrument to look good for the musician in the shop, when sitting in their practice space, and up on a stage in a concert hall. This also means that comparing what is in front of you to photographs can be misleading if you’re not careful. By way of demonstration, these four photos were all taken with white light from the same angle and with the same intensity. The only thing I varied was the temperature of the light from the warm light of an incandescent bulb to the cool white of a fluorescent lamp. All of them are “true” representations of what the instrument looks like right now, but at the same time none of them are really what it looks like in person. Because varnish can be so fickle I am rarely confident in what I have produced, but I think I like where this one is headed. It’s nearly done but there is a bit of retouch and work still to be done, not so much to change the overall color or look but to make some of the transitions and edges look a bit more natural and less flat. Then, to finish it off will come a clear coat and some polishing. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #varnish
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On the subject of ff-holes, I thought I’d share this nifty tool for #tooltuesday. It’s a circle cutter. The central shaft goes through a guide hole (that you pre-drill) and then the two wings cut a nice perfect circle. I have a whole set of cutters for different size holes in ½ millimeter steps. This is how the ff-holes get started. The “eyes” at the top and bottom are cut first with this tool. Then I connect them with a coping saw. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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This is not a photo of me positioning the ff-holes. I’m actually using the ff-holes to check my arching. You may remember in a previous post I shared how the ff-hole layout can be sensitive to the curvature of the top. Here I am using that fact, but in reverse. By seeing how the ff-holes will fall I can check whether my concept for carving the top is making sense. It is of course possible for the ff-holes to come out perfectly and still have a top that is very very off. Still, sketching the ff-holes at this stage—especially if they don’t come out perfectly!—can give me some insight. This isn’t something I always do. But because I am less familiar with this particular model, and especially with the best approach for the arching of this model, I am taking all the help I can get. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Hopefully this maple still looks as stunning out in the sunlight as when I shared a photo of the raw slab of wood! #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #maple
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#ThrowBackThursday to that time I sawed open a (very cheap, not playable) cello as part of an art project in collaboration with the Boston Ballet. Thank you to @set_c_colon for the photo! #violin #violinmaker #violinmaking #lutier
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This is beautiful spruce. My last violin had beautiful spruce too, but it was beautiful in a different way. The spruce on the previous violin had a sparkle in its eye, like there was a bit of flair just about to burst loose, while this one one feels more like a sharply cut bright gem. That means that this piece demands a different approach to properly honor its potential. And, to be honest this one is more of a challenge for me because it doesn’t suits my inherent inclination as well. The beauty here is less in letting the organic nature of the wood shine through and more in showing off the clean precision the wood can achieve. These are, of course, all subjective poetic exaggerations. Sound and playability are still my first priority no matter what the material. But hopefully this gives you a sense of how the work is filtered through my personal aesthetic as it interacts with my relationship to the wood. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #spruce
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Spinoza The Cat is an important member of my workshop, or at least he thinks so. Some makers joke about how their animal companions and/or children are their apprentices. To me Spinoza is more like a manager. He is constantly staring at me, often demands things from me, sometimes interrupts me, and rarely does any work himself. #catsofinstragram #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Working on a new model is like exploring a city for the first time. You start with rumors, anecdotes, stories brought back from travelers who have gone before. Some of them may even have taken a few snapshots to share with you. All of this will help you plan your journey. But what you are really hoping for is a map, and maybe a guide book to go with it. Maps are, as Borges reminds us, not 1:1 copies of that which they represent. They are abstract guides. Choices have to be made about what features to include, exclude, highlight, what projection to use, what scale, etc.; and of course there is always the potential of errors and distortion to creep in. For violins these maps can take the form of technical drawings; photographs, from different angles and with different lighting including UV; CT scans; and what I am using today: casts. I know these all may seem like exact representations but I want to insist on the metaphor of the map. Making is not mechanically copying. Even with the very best map, even if you have Google Street View, you still have to explore and discover your own route and destination for yourself, resulting in an experience unique to you and that specific moment in time. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #borges
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I stepped outside to see how this varnish looked in the natural sunlight—which is important because varnish can look very different in different lights—, and my partner kindly snapped this photo of me. I’ll have some more photos of the varnish itself next week. #violin #violinmaker #violinmaking #lutier #varnish
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Obviously you’re looking at a very rough stage here, but it’s rough in a specific way. The wood for the back of this violin had a lot of extra material on it when I started—in part because of the way the one piece back was cut from the tree as a uniformly thick slab, as opposed to bookmatching two quartered wedges which leaves the edges thinner than the center. So even though I saved some time not having to join two pieces, I now have to spend more time removing wood. I went at it with my (wooden ECE) scrub plane to knock off a lot of material quickly. You can see that I went for a sort of four sided pyramid shape¹. The tool I was using, the scrub plane, lends itself well to working in this way. Even though the final arching is all curves, the plane wants to make more or less flat planes. But that doesn’t mean I am fighting the nature of the tool to get what I want. On the contrary. This shape it has produced actually fits well with my very abstract conception of what the final arching should be. That isn’t quite the same as saying it has produced a very nice rough approximation of the final arching. When working mechanically you often proceed from a rough version towards the finished product. But here it’s more that I am working, at least at this stage, from a more abstract conception of the final arching towards a more concrete version. And, a four sided flat topped pyramid is actually a pretty good abstraction of a violin arch. Working in this way means, first of all, working faster. There is no point in worrying about the arch on a micro level with so much material still to remove. Carefully reproducing the final arch but 5 millimeters too thick everywhere is a bit pointless. And at the same time it helps me see where I am going. As I work the physical piece of wood I am can continuously refine my initial arching concept until it’s brought into final focus in the actual arching. #violinmaking #violinmaker #violin #lutier [1] Technically, with the flat bit at the top it’s called a frustum. You’re welcome.
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I've really come to love the wood on this back as I've been varnishing. I know the flame tends to hog the limelight, and this piece has lovely flame that is really showing its depth with the varnish. But what is making me love this maple more and more is the wide grain and, for lack of a better description, rustic “imperfections”. There is—and this is all totally subjective and my own poetic free association—to me an unpretentious honesty to the wood that conveys a lot of character without veering off into wild showy oddity. It's just been very satisfying to varnish. #violin #violinmaker #violinmaking #varnish
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This is the clock that hangs in my workshop. It’s made from a kit my partner gifted me mounted on a print of the famous astronomical clock in Cremona. I don’t actually glance at it often. Most of my work isn’t measured in minutes and hours, but days or weeks. I have a loose sense of how long each step takes. I use that mostly to plan and arrange my time. There are certain tasks I’d rather not put down once I’ve begun, while others I purposely want to have time to take a break during. There are some that I aim to end the day with, to let glue dry or such, and other I like to start my mornings with. My plan is never a strict factory schedule; it is constantly updated as I go. But time isn’t just an organizing principle. It’s also a pressure pushing forward. If I don’t finish an instrument I can't sell it. And perniciously, because I work for myself, if I don’t work today I won’t notice that I’m not getting paid until months later. When I was in violin making school I thought I would never be able to work fast enough to make this a sustainable living. Lately I have felt a little more confident about it…though I have plenty of other worries about my making¹. Speed in craft rarely comes from running the machine (i.e. yourself) at a higher rate of speed. It’s more about cutting more confidently down to your line, understanding your tools and their relationship to the your goal, and finding ways to avoid having to rework the same thing twice. In other words, how to work with as little fret and worry as possible. Because of Covid-19 I have hardly left the house for 2+ months now. Without the usual external markers of rhythm I feel like time has been moving more slowly. My work at the bench, however, has actually been proceeding a little more quickly without all my usual distractions. It’s a cliché to say that these are strange times so I’ll just say stay safe and take care of each other. [1] Including whether or not this can be a sustainable living for me, to be honest. #tooltuesday #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Just a varnish update. Welcome to Monday! #violin #varnish #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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I am using oil varnish made Joe over at @joethevarnishguy. A bunch of folks have asked why violins get varnished the way they do, considering they look pretty good just bare. To which I answer: I’m glad you like how my instruments look in the white! Varnish can’t save a so-so violin, but (hopefully) it can make a nice fiddle look even better. There are three reasons for varnish. First is protection. Without varnish raw wood gets dirty very quickly with dirt, rosin, and sweat. You end up with a grimy instrument that’s impossible to clean and, eventually, damaged wood. Second is acoustics. This isn’t actually of a reason for varnish, but more a consideration for which varnish. For today let’s just leave it at: I know that the traditional oil-resin varnish I use works well. Third and finally: aesthetics. This one is tough because it’s so personal and folks have a wide range of ideas from super pale to dark dark brown. People’s preferences are often set by past exposure. One musician might associate a particular shade with an instrument they have fond memories of. Or, a particular varnish might recall to someone a cheap mass produced instrument they once had. Pleasing everyone isn’t possible. I generally aim for a “classic Cremonese” (a concept worth unpacking on its own) look. That’s what I spend so much of my time looking at, that it ends up looking the most natural to me. It’s also broadly popular. At the end of the trying to sell these things. Or, at the very least, I can explain and justify it a potential customer. And while I am all having a stand-out sense of fashion…that just isn’t where the classical music world is most of the time. Also, I really do think it looks good, and I have to spend a lot time staring at it too! Whispered p.s. While varnish is important for selling, and for the musician who has to spend hours with an instrument practicing, the audience can usually only barely make it out from their seats in the dim light in the hall. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #varnish
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I've already shared some of the prep work for my next instrument, but I want to backtrack for a moment and talk about what the plan is for this violin. It's going to be based off of the work of Giuseppe Guarneri, more commonly known as “del Gesu”. Del Gesu might not be as famous as Strad, but he is held in equally high esteem by violin makers, players, (and I guess dealers too judging by prices but that's a rabbit hole for another day…) Quick biographical background: Violin making family, 3rd generation, from Cremona, and a contemporary of Strad. They even lived on the same street at one point. Here you can see the difference in outline between the del Gesu (black) and Strad (copper) templates, particularly in the curve of the c-bout and the point of the corner. There is always a temptation, a desire, to summaries of the differences in style and aesthetic between makers in pithy generalizations. They’re not necessarily wrong—and can even be helpful, I suppose, to someone trying to make a quick identification of an instrument—but, as a maker I am wary of getting too stuck on them for three reasons. First, the variations between a maker’s different instruments are often as interesting and informative as the similarities, and I don’t want to wash those away. Second, they often end up being couched in terms of the maker’s personality and I think when we do that we end up projecting our conceptions of work and craft onto a different historical era and are more likely to misunderstand their craft choices. And third, and closely relatedly, I prefer to center the specifics of a maker’s working method and logic because I think it helps me better understand the details of the finished instrument. All of which is to say that while of course Strad and del Gesu have a very different aesthetic, as a maker I try not to make that’s not my starting point when trying to understand what makes a del Gesu a del Gesu. Instead it’s the physical object and how it was made. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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Some more varnish process photos, this time of the top at about the same stage as the back from those photos I share on Monday. For some reason I find the top far more difficult to photograph well. (If anyone has suggestions or tips on this, I would love to hear them!) #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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It’s #tooltuesday and perhaps my most important tool is my bench. There is hardly any work I do that doesn’t rely on my workbench. Full disclosure, it’s not usually this tidy but I took advantage of a mini cleaning spree to snap this photo. My current set up is not ideal but I am lucky enough to have a nice window with ok-ish light to work by. (Bench location is almost as important as the workbench itself!) To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t love my bench. It’s been a sort of evolving ad-hoc solution for the last few years as I keep moving and working out of non-permanent spaces. I would love to upgrade to something more solid and with a nicer vice in the future. But, it’s actually quite impressive how much even a simple solution like mine can get done. This is what I use to join plates, saw outlines with my bow saw, carve arching, everything really. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier
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I’ve started the varnish process on this Strad based model so I’ll be posting updates of what it looks like in between thoughts about the new build. Each step, each layer of additional varnish, even though they are incredibly thin alters the instrument both so subtly and profoundly that it can be difficult to remember what it looked like just 5 minutes before. I take lots of photos mostly to help me retain perspective on where I am and where I’m going. Unfortunately it is very difficult to to take good “true” photos of varnish. Our perception of light and color is impressively amazing and frustratingly tricky. So these won’t be a definitive guide to varnishing but just “fuzzy” snapshots of where I am on the day. #violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier #varnish
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Almost nothing on a finished violin is perfectly straight or flat. And yet, as a maker I spend quite a bit of time getting my material straight and/or flat. I promise it’s not out of any ideological commitment. It’s usually so that I will have a nice consistent reference from which work going forward. I could keep planing until I got this piece super duper flat. It would be a cool party trick. But that’s not what I need right now. I just need pretty flat so there won’t be any surprises after I fit and glue the center joint. #catsofinstagram #violin #violinmaker #violinmaking #lutier
![Obviously you’re looking at a very rough stage here, but it’s rough in a specific way.
The wood for the back of this violin had a lot of extra material on it when I started—in part because of the way the one piece back was cut from the tree as a uniformly thick slab, as opposed to bookmatching two quartered wedges which leaves the edges thinner than the center. So even though I saved some time not having to join two pieces, I now have to spend more time removing wood.
I went at it with my (wooden ECE) scrub plane to knock off a lot of material quickly. You can see that I went for a sort of four sided pyramid shape¹. The tool I was using, the scrub plane, lends itself well to working in this way. Even though the final arching is all curves, the plane wants to make more or less flat planes.
But that doesn’t mean I am fighting the nature of the tool to get what I want. On the contrary. This shape it has produced actually fits well with my very abstract conception of what the final arching should be. That isn’t quite the same as saying it has produced a very nice rough approximation of the final arching. When working mechanically you often proceed from a rough version towards the finished product. But here it’s more that I am working, at least at this stage, from a more abstract conception of the final arching towards a more concrete version. And, a four sided flat topped pyramid is actually a pretty good abstraction of a violin arch.
Working in this way means, first of all, working faster. There is no point in worrying about the arch on a micro level with so much material still to remove. Carefully reproducing the final arch but 5 millimeters too thick everywhere is a bit pointless. And at the same time it helps me see where I am going. As I work the physical piece of wood I am can continuously refine my initial arching concept until it’s brought into final focus in the actual arching.
#violinmaking #violinmaker #violin #lutier [1] Technically, with the flat bit at the top it’s called a frustum. You’re welcome.](https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/97870798_173263074012796_3684849348736422957_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=0YKxPpmFHzsAX-cfsIn&_nc_ht=scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com&oh=40cd1d6bf8207ca9ae9b3ede7724ff56&oe=5F2DBAA0)
![This is the clock that hangs in my workshop. It’s made from a kit my partner gifted me mounted on a print of the famous astronomical clock in Cremona. I don’t actually glance at it often. Most of my work isn’t measured in minutes and hours, but days or weeks. I have a loose sense of how long each step takes. I use that mostly to plan and arrange my time.
There are certain tasks I’d rather not put down once I’ve begun, while others I purposely want to have time to take a break during. There are some that I aim to end the day with, to let glue dry or such, and other I like to start my mornings with. My plan is never a strict factory schedule; it is constantly updated as I go.
But time isn’t just an organizing principle. It’s also a pressure pushing forward. If I don’t finish an instrument I can't sell it. And perniciously, because I work for myself, if I don’t work today I won’t notice that I’m not getting paid until months later.
When I was in violin making school I thought I would never be able to work fast enough to make this a sustainable living. Lately I have felt a little more confident about it…though I have plenty of other worries about my making¹. Speed in craft rarely comes from running the machine (i.e. yourself) at a higher rate of speed. It’s more about cutting more confidently down to your line, understanding your tools and their relationship to the your goal, and finding ways to avoid having to rework the same thing twice. In other words, how to work with as little fret and worry as possible.
Because of Covid-19 I have hardly left the house for 2+ months now. Without the usual external markers of rhythm I feel like time has been moving more slowly. My work at the bench, however, has actually been proceeding a little more quickly without all my usual distractions. It’s a cliché to say that these are strange times so I’ll just say stay safe and take care of each other. [1] Including whether or not this can be a sustainable living for me, to be honest.
#tooltuesday
#violin #violinmaking #violinmaker #lutier](https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/97296617_128532702151012_5527879743248349723_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=4D4V1aQgjHEAX94-AjX&_nc_ht=scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com&oh=9a2806735d839b227a27af69aa7a81fd&oe=5F2CAA93)
