How to Clean Your Stringed Instrument at Home

Minor maintenance of violins, violas and cellos can and should be done by the player. Know what you’re doing – including when to call a professional.

All stringed instruments ¬– violins, cellos and violas – are in certain respects alive. The strings, the various components (neck, pegbox, pegs, strings, bow and bow strings, the body and finish, even inside the instrument) have components that are subject to dirt, dust, your perspiration, and excess rosin. Without proper maintenance those components can suffer ¬– and so too might your playing.

Some maintenance and repairs are best done by your preferred local violin shop (your violin maker, who often is the violin repairer). But on a regular basis the violinist, cellist, bassist, etc. should maintain certain habits and routines to minimize damage and maximize the life and performance of his or her instrument.

This is equally true of higher-end, fine stringed instruments as well as student and intermediate models. Proper, ongoing maintenance is just the rule of the day.

Think of the approach to cleaning your instrument at home in three parts:

Step 1: Before playing

• Wash your hands.
• Check to make sure you cleaned it after playing it last time (if not, follow Step 2 before playing, and again after finishing).

Step 2: After playing

• Look at what a mess you made! Rosin dust, human sweat …
• Get out two lint-free dry cloths. These can be microfiber fabrics, such as those used to clean eyeglasses and computer and phone screens. Or, a thin cotton cloth that has been washed a sufficient number of times there is not fiber residue. Technically speaking, no fabric is completely lint-free; it’s a matter of how much (less is more where it comes to cleaning stringed instruments).
• Remove the shoulder rests from violins and violas.
• The first cloth should be used to wipe the strings of bow rosin and other accumulated dirt.
• The second cloth is to clean off the neck and body of the instrument. Why a second cloth? The rosin dust on the first can scratch the varnish on other parts of the instrument.

Periodically (as needed, depending on frequency and duration of play)

• A “magic rub eraser” is another means for removing rosin, but only from non-porous surfaces. Considered an “art eraser,” they are made with soft vinyl and are sold under different brand names (Prismacolor, Pentel, Paper Mate, Faber-Castell and Bazic, among others).
• Never use alcohol, acetone or paint thinner to remove rosin or grease on strings or the body of the instrument.
• For insistent marks or accumulated dirt on the instrument body, see your violin maker for violin cleaning products.
• The bridge might have collected rosin as well. In hard to reach areas use a cotton swab (Q-tip). On other areas use a soft cloth.
• To polish the violin, viola, cello or bass, use only instrument (not furniture) polish purchased from your luthier.
• Clean the bow also with a light cloth, wiping in the direction of the hairs, taking care to use a light touch and not going against the grain.
• Very valuable, antique instruments should be cleaned by professional violinmakers.

Keep in mind the violin case, its home when not being played, should be clean as well. A vacuum hose should be used on the case to suck away dust.

A clean instrument is one with a long life and brilliant sound. Careful and constant attention makes it happen.

Getting a Fine Instrument Insured: Some Helpful Tips

Fine instruments are beautiful works of craftsmanship, and very vulnerable to come what may. Being careful means obtaining an insurance policy.

There are horror stories about fine stringed instruments getting damaged. You’ve heard them. Despite meticulous care and love a musician puts into his or her instrument, it can be destroyed in an instant.
Wunderkind David Garrett was age 26 in 2008 when it happened. After the end of a concern at London’s Barbican he tripped on a wet outdoor staircase, fell – and landed on his 1772 Giovanni Guadagnini violin. It was shortly after he finished paying off the £ 1.2 million loan to purchase it. The accident, even though the violin was in its case, was catastrophic for the instrument. Garrett was uninjured.

“I felt as if I’d lost a friend,” the virtuoso told a writer for The Guardian newspaper. “The body was cracked all over. I must have sat there for 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t shout or cry. I just stared. I was in shock. Some moments in life are almost impossible to grasp – surreal. I was in a state of disbelief.”

Garrett was in many respects fortunate. He believes the violin in its case, strapped to his back, may have prevented bodily injury. And the fine violin was insured. It took a violin shop seven-months to repair the violin at a cost of £60,000 and restored the instrument to playing condition.

Insurance works – even for student instruments

Not every violin is worth a million dollars (or Pounds Sterling, in the case of UK currency). But even if an instrumentalist invests only $500 in a violin, viola, cello, base or harp, that is money that came through someone’s hard work. Fortunately, there is a way to insure almost everything. The trick is to pay only as much as is required to prevent a complete loss resulting from a theft, accident or natural disaster.

Here are key considerations in how to insure a musical instrument:

Value of the instrument – Of course repair and replacement costs for an instrument of any value is the goal. For non-professionals, a lower-cost instrument will have a lower insurance cost. Professional instruments valued above $5,000 will of course require a better policy at a higher premium. Every instrument, every player’s circumstances and every insurer must be considered to identify instrument value and insurance cost.

Existing homeowner or renter insurance policy – Lower-value instruments may well fall under a home/renter’s policy. But some only cover the instrument in the home, or for damage due to theft or fire but not floods and earthquakes. Theft from a car might be treated differently than from the home. Ask your insurance agent.

Travel? – Boarding planes, passing through immigration, staying in hotels and playing in unfamiliar concert halls can bring different risks to the instrument. Insurers will want to know about this in order to write an appropriate policy.

Larger instruments cost more – That fine cello is larger, easier to bump into, subject to different conditions while traveling, and doesn’t accompany the player into every room the way a prized violin might. This adds to overall vulnerability as well as to insurance premiums.

There are several different insurance companies that specialize in musical instruments (ValuePenguin, Heritage, Harmonia, Clarion, Anderson, Merz-Huber, and others). But household-name companies (Allstate, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, etc.) offer policies as well.

In case you think Garrett’s experience was isolated, think again. Cellist Peter Stumpf simply left his Stradivarius cello on his front doorstep after performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was stolen, damaged, dumped, then found by a nurse whose boyfriend offered to use his carpentry skills to fashion it into a CD rack (this was in 2004). The $3.5 million instrument made the news, so fortunately the nurse and her boyfriend became aware of it’s value and returned the instrument to Stumpf. The cello needed repairs – fortunately, a luthier was able to restore it to fine condition.

Geared Pegs for Stringed Instruments

The “planetary geared” peg makes tuning easier on violins, violas, and cellos. There are several additional reasons to favor them.

Geared pegs are a newer innovation when it comes to useful – some may say ingenious – stringed instrument accessories. Widely available both online as well as at the local violin shop, these pegs boil down larger points of difference – some might say conflicts – within a relatively simple, small thing.

If you’re new to what a geared peg is, here’s the simplest explanation: the tension and therefore tuning of strings on any type of stringed instrument (violin, viola, cello, bass, ukulele, etc.) can happen at either end: the pegbox at the top of the instrument, or the fine tuners at the bottom of the instrument (toward the chinrest on a violin). But for the most part, the tuning pegs at the scroll end are most frequently adjusted to achieve proper tuning.

Historically, these pegs were held in place and adjusted by friction between the peg and the surrounding pegbox wood. But a geared peg is more technically advanced. Hidden inside what appear to be traditional pegs are a set of planetary gears –¬ so named because they involve a smaller (the “sun”) and larger (“ring,” like planets) toothed gears – that do two things. One is that they allow for more precise tuning because it takes bigger, more exaggerated movement by the hands of the instrumentalist to achieve smaller changes in the tension. Second, it makes the process of tuning easier for those hands (i.e., less pressure and strength is required).

So what’s the conflict?

For starters, Stradivari, Guarneri and all other pre-20th century violinmakers never worked with geared pegs. These are modern innovations, arguably in the category of steel (not gut) strings and composite (not pernambuco) bows. Purists may scoff, but under many conditions and circumstances these newer innovations make sense. What’s interesting is that makers of geared pegs are careful to ensure the appearance of the pegs is preserved, not visible to anyone observing the instrument even at close distance.

Another conflict that is essentially solved with geared pegs is how abrupt humidity differences require acclimatization of the instrument and therefore frequent tuning. This is because wood pegs and the pegbox into which they are inserted are made of different types of wood that respond differently to humidity and aridity. The traveling violinist, violist or cellist knows how important this can be.

But perhaps the conflict resolution that geared pegs provide that is of greatest benefit to the vast majority of players is the ease with which geared pegs are adjusted. Children and older adults, or anyone with compromised wrist biomechanics, may lack the sufficient strength to execute the somewhat awkward maneuver of traditional pegs.

Is the sound different when played on an instrument with geared pegs? As with gut vs. steel and pernambuco vs. composite, it mostly boils down to the player and their pragmatic considerations (and having a good luthier to install them). In some cases it’s almost impossible to know, since those gears are hidden within the traditional-appearing pegs.

“Violins of Hope” Immortalize Music of Holocaust Musicians

While not intrinsically great instruments, Jewish-owned violins, cellos and violas that somehow survived the concentration camps live on in concert. 

Among the many perverse facts of the Holocaust is there were camp orchestras. Talented instrumentalists from the Jewish and “Gypsy” (Roma) communities involuntarily held by the murderous regime were put to work to provide music. Their audiences were new arrivals as they disembarked from cattle cars, some as they were led to certain death while others judged healthy enough to work to barracks. Some of the musicians were forced to entertain their captors at parties.

It’s impossible to not mentally summon the theme from Schindler’s List, the 1993 movie about the Holocaust (composed and conducted by John Williams, featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman). The music performed by the camp orchestras included marches, parlor music, dance music, popular music of the day, film and operetta melodies, the works of Richard Wagner and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Auschwitz composer Henryk Krol wrote Arbeitslagermarsch, the Concentration Camp Labor March.

Since 1996, the father and son team of Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, based in Tel Aviv, have been collecting the violins, violas and cellos that were owned by these camp musicians before and during World War 2. The collection has grown to more than 60 instruments, each with a story: Some were used in the camps; some were tossed from those trains as they were headed to the camps. The collection is known as the Violins of Hope.

One instrument in the collection, the Auschwitz violin, was made around 1850 in Germany and was purchased in the post-War years from a penniless survivor. Like many of the stringed instruments, it was neither rare nor valuable. Another German-made violin, circa 1900, was tossed from a train traveling from France by a desperate man who said “In the place where I now go I don’t need a violin – here, take my violin so it may live!” A worker obliged his request but never played it. Decades later his children told the story to a violinmaker in the South of France who purchased it and turned it over to the Weinsteins for the Violins of Hope project.

But Violins of Hope is more than instruments that the Weinsteins have restored to playing condition. It’s a series of concerts using these instruments, held around the world, accompanied by discussions on the significance of the instruments. Despite the fact these are not Stradivarius violins, virtuosos the likes of Shlomo Mintz (Jerusalem), David Russell (music professor at the University of North Carolina) and others play them. Upcoming concerts in 2019 and 2020 are in Louisville, Kentucky; Fort Wayne, Indiana; San Francisco; and Los Angeles.

Amnon Weinstein told National Public Radio in 2012 that violins were commonly displayed on the walls of Jewish homes, particularly among Orthodox Jews who were forbidden from displaying portraits or sculpture. He was first asked to restore one such violin in the early 1960s by a musician-survivor who had been part of the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra, but Weinstein was repulsed by the presence of ashes inside the instrument and refused to work with it – in part because he himself had lost many family members to the Holocaust.

Weinstein’s emotions on that had softened by the 1990s when he launched Violins of Hope. “All instruments have a common denominator,” he says on his website. “They had to do with the war. To be more specific, they had to do with the Holocaust –­ death or survival. And hope. All instruments were symbols of hope and a way to say, remember me, remember us. Life is good, celebrate it for those who perished, for those who survived. For all people.”

That clearly includes the doomed violinist on that French train. His violin miraculously survives. “The sound of violins is often compared to the beauty of the human voice,” Weinstein writes. “When played with talent and spirit, it is known to reach out and touch hearts. This was the role of violins in the war –­ to touch hearts, kindle hope for better times and spread it around. Wherever there was music, there was hope.”

Wolf Tones and What to Do About Them

The physics of music matters, particularly when a cello, bass or violin produces an unintended sound. Understand how it works to fix it.

There are many reasons why education policy experts encourage adding an A, for arts, to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), giving us STEAM. The general theory is that the engineer with a background in art can think more expansively and creatively. The example of this at work is often how Apple Computers increased its market share with friendly designs and an aesthetic interface.

That said, the benefit could go in the other direction, where artists benefit from understanding science. The making of music, as in the vibrations produced in fine string instruments, is in fact a product of physics. Modulations of compressed air caused by vibration are entirely responsible for what makes Tchaikovsky’s Cello Concerto fragment (completed by Ukrainian cellist-composer Yuriy Leonovich) soar, from the Allegro maestoso (B minor) through the Andante (G major) and Allegro vivo-Meno moso-Presto (B minor).

Yet, certain of those physical vibrations happen to be the cause of the very vexing “wolf tones” that can cause great players and great instruments to sound – unfairly – flawed.

Why is this? Students with an interest in the violin, cello and viola probably understand the basics of string vibrations. The sliding of a bow or plucking on the strings cause those strings to vibrate, but the fullness of the sound is also due to vibration interaction with the body of the instrument. The interaction between these two components is what lends the musical notes their full resonance.

Which is to say the body of the instrument vibrates as well. Every physical object, from micro-sized specs of dust to huge office towers has what is called acoustic resonance, the vibration of that object. Now, the physics student – who is also a violinist – will know that doesn’t always work out so well. The phenomenon of wolf tones occurs when the vibrational frequency of two things – here, the string and the instrument body – is the same or very close.

A wolf tone will more typically happen on a cello or a bass, less noticeably on a violin. The sound begins with the intended note that disappears and is replaced by a different note and sometimes a stuttering sound. On a cello, that can happen on the D string between the E and F#, or the same pitch in higher positions on the G or C strings.

The first instinct is to assume there is something wrong with the instrument, or the player. Au contraire, mon ami. In fact a cello in good adjustment – properly fitted bridge and soundpost – is more likely to suffer from wolf tones. A visit to your local violin shop can make this determination.
There are several means to tame the wolf, so to speak. Rubber mutes and brass suppressors placed between the bridge and the tailpiece on the G or C strings might help. Other remedies might be: adjust the sound post, try different brands of string, change the tail piece or make a tailgut wire adjustment.

Some cellists find that simply squeezing the body of the instrument with the knees attenuates the effect. So while that application of physiology might seem unorthodox, consider the potentially destructive force of acoustic resonance in one very large building, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan. Building engineers used a 660 metric ton pendulum, also known as a tuned mass harmonic damper, to reduce the amplitude of mechanical vibrations caused by wind on the 101-story (1,671 foot tall) structure. This minimizes swaying and twisting of the building, which otherwise would cause motion sickness in occupants and even possibly structural failure.

Science matters – and it works!

The Lowdown on the Viola and Violin Shoulder Rest

Violinists are split on if the shoulder rest helps or hurts their play. Medical professionals recommend it for people with sore necks and shoulders.

The sound a violinist produces, as well as the mastery he or she has with the technical aspects of the score, is considered the goal and achievement of the musician. But if the player develops orthopedic issues that make him unable to play there will be no music at all.

This is why developing proper posture for violinists and other instrumentalists is more than just important – it can kill the enjoyment of playing, perhaps even the ability to play entirely.

A study conducted in Brazil and reported in Acta Ortopedica Brasileira, a peer-reviewed medical journal (and cited by the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information), on the physical demands of musicians, in particular the musculoskeletal disorders that “most frequently affect professional violinists and violists.” It looked how “playing a musical instrument involves a combination of actions, including rapid, repetitive and complicated movements of the hands and fingers … the neck, shoulder and temporomandibular joints are the most commonly affected areas, due to prolonged flexion of the head required to hold the violin.”

Prescriptives cited by the study include “the use of the chin rest and of the shoulder rest (commonly used accessories for violins and violas) at appropriate heights … can alleviate discomfort, even if they increase the weight of the instrument by up to 20 percent.”

Yet, some musicians wouldn’t consider using an appendage to the instrument. Shoulder rests – variously made of wood, aluminum, carbon fiber and soft plastic – are used by both players of violins and violas and are readily available at any online violin store as well as brick and mortar shops. They attach to the edge of the back of the violin, which might affect the sound quality by dampening the vibrations of the instrument.

The benefit of the shoulder rest is it can lighten the work on the left hand, allowing that hand to move more smoothly and fluidly with lighter shifting technique.

Many accomplished violinists use one, however many do not. Nathan Cole, the first associate concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a faculty member of the Colburn School for the Performing Arts, used a shoulder rest for his first 30 years of play. When invited by the owner of a Stradivarius (most often played by Nathan Millstein) to give a short recital in the owner’s home on that instrument, he realized it would not be acceptable to use a shoulder rest. The experience was initially daunting, but he found he was able to do it without the shoulder rest. He reports on his blog, “I’ve arrived at a different vibrato and a greater variety of shifts, compare to my rest-ing days…I like the changes.” He adds he changed his chinrest to something very minimal, that he brings the instrument up rather than to lower his head, and that his shoulder occasionally rises momentarily.

So if you use a shoulder rest, try it without. But if you have neck or shoulder issues, it might be worth to give a shoulder rest a try.

Fibonacci Series and Stradivarius Instruments

Math is intrinsic to music. But what’s truly fascinating is how the designs of fine violins, flowers and huge galaxies connect to Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio.

The Fibonacci Series might sound like a spy thriller, but it’s perhaps more exciting because it draws a direct, mathematical connection between the human perception of beauty and nature itself. It also was the basis for the proportions that Antonio Stradivari used to construct his eponymous violins.

It starts with a mathematical pattern of increasing values. They are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 and so on; each number represents the sum of the two preceding it. Taking any one number from the series above 5 – let’s say 21 – and dividing it by the previous number (in this case 13), the ratio is 1.6. This is referred to as the Golden Ratio.

Represented in geometric forms these numbers and the Golden Ratio create a spiral that is seen in both art and nature. To a musician, the bass clef is essentially this form. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is composed of points that conform to this geometry. Mozart wrote many of his two-part sonatas according to the Golden Ratio: the exposition (musical theme) is 38 bars and the development and recapitulation (where the theme is developed and repeated) is 62 bars, and 62 divided by 38 is 1.631. Western harmony and musical scales, with 13 notes in an octave and eight notes in a scale, also produce (via division) 1.625.

With Stradivarius’ fine violins, the master violinmaker’s designs follow the Golden Ratio in the proportions of specific parts of the violin. The violinmaker ensured the proportion of the neck, pegbox and scroll to the body of the violin (upper bout, waist and lower bout) achieves the ratio.

Also, subdivisions of the instrument – waist to upper bout, waist and upper bout to those sections plus the neck – meet the 1.6 ratio as well. (Note: there seems not to be the same mathematical principle applied to fine cellos, violas, and stringed bass instruments created by the master maker).

Is this what make the music from a Strad so rich and resonant? So many other factors are involved (the density of Cremonese wood in the 17th century, for starters) but it bears noting that the Golden Ratio is also used in saxophone mouthpieces and the acoustic design of many cathedrals. In the Journal of the American Viola Society, a 1994 analysis of Bartok’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (Movement Two) argues the composition relies heavily on the Fibonacci Series.

Where this takes a fascinating turn is how the Golden Ratio and its geometric representation is found in nature and even in space. The logarithmic spiral, found in seashells and sometimes called “the golden spiral,” look a lot like that bass clef and range in sizes from tiny to much bigger – all within the same ratio. But those same spirals repeat in spiral galaxies, where the arms of stars, gas and dust extend from the galaxy center in a pinwheel-like fashion – a pattern in proportions also seen in satellite images of hurricanes. The human face, by the averages, follows the Golden Ratio in where the eyes, nose and chin are positioned. The proportion of DNA molecules, 34 by 21 angstroms, fit the ratio as well. In flower petals, the lily has three, buttercups have five, chicory flowers have 21 and daisies have 34. Nature places all petals in the 360-degree circle, at a turn of 0.618030 (an inverse of the 1.6 ratio). Seed heads in sunflowers repeat the spiral seen in these other examples.

Is it possible that this Fibonacci Series is a universal proportion, determined by some version of intelligent design? That’s subject to some debate, to put it mildly. But what’s clear is it all adds up in Stradivarius violins playing Mozart sonatas.