Ways to Electrify an Acoustic Fiddle

The electric guitar didn’t kill the acoustic ones, and neither have electric violins diminished acoustic violins. They broaden artistic range.

Is it somehow unwholesome for the serious violinist with a firm grounding in classical music to toy with the idea of electric violins? Or for that matter, can players of cellos, violas, and the stringed bass also consider what kinds of sounds they can produce with an electrified instrument?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about it, as the work of players such as Mark Wood (Trans-Siberian Orchestra), avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson, jazz violinist Regina Carter, Myleene Klass (British pop group Hear’Say), and Miki Fujimoto (violinist in the progressive rock band Fantasmagoria) prove out. These are serious, accomplished musicians who no doubt began their training in the rigors of classical music but later found their path to more contemporary and often experimental music. All have a following that appreciates their creative voices. And they probably had good counsel from their favorite violin shop.

There are two primary means of creating electrified violin music. One is to buy an electric violin – another topic for another day – and the other is to simply amplify a traditional violin with a microphone. The amplification method can be done by three different methods:

Microphone near the violin: This is no different than simply creating any sound that is then amplified on a public address system, as with someone speaking at a microphone in front of a large crowd. Freestanding microphones are used in recording studios where ambient noise is all but eliminated; in a larger concert setting the microphone can pick up sounds from other sources.

Mini microphone attached to the violin: This is where a small microphone is mounted on the side of the instrument over the bridge area. The sound pickup is much more direct and arguably produces the most natural sound.

Pickups: Like the mini microphone, it is attached to the acoustic instrument but has fewer feedback problems. As such, pickups are generally preferred by musicians who are serious about electrifying their violins. Mounted on the instrument, under or near the bridge or tailpiece, a pickup comes in magnetic and electrodynamic versions. These are newer technologies and favored for a warmer sound.

While designed for the violin, the pickups can amplify a viola, cello and upright bass. The additional advantage for the violinist, particularly those who want to provide a more theatrical performance, is the pickup is more mobile and therefore allows the player to roam about a performance space without being tied to a boomed microphone.

Additional items to add to an electric strings sound include effects processors and stomp boxes. An all-in-one option for beginners is a multi-effects processor that produces (intentionally) reverbs and delays as well as (intentionally) distortions and overdriven tones.

Laurie Anderson might have been a challenge to her classical instructors – she graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College and got a masters degree in sculpture from Columbia University – but her use of magnetic tape in place of horsehair bows on her violin in the 1970s is still talked about today. Electric or electrified violins can create art that even Niccolo Paganini might appreciate.

Understanding Humidity and Stringed Instruments

Atmospheric water - humidity - changes the size and weight of wood in violins, cellos and other stringed instruments. But it can be managed.

Perhaps Vivaldi understood both the beauties and curses of nature. Arguably the composer’s most popular composition, “The Four Seasons” (Le Quattro Stagioni), celebrates the changes from spring through summer, fall and winter. But he also might have known how changes in weather can subtly torture fine cellos, violins, basses, and all other wooden-stringed instruments.

That’s because all of those instruments are forged from an organic product, wood, that is affected by humidity. The violin that plays well outside on a hot, sultry summer night will need care and adjustment if moved inside to a dehumidified space (such as a concert hall) or transported to a dry, cooler climate a day or two later. Humidity changes are the enemy of stringed instruments.

The scientific explanation of this is in equilibrium moisture content (EMC), which is the balance between water bonded within the wood of the instrument itself and water in the air. That moisture in the wood, when newly introduced (e.g., when the violin travels from dry, coastal California by airplane to a humid Georgia in summer), will have several effects on the instrument and how it plays:

Expansion (humid air) and contraction (dry air) of all pieces of wood. The effects of shrunk (when dry) or swollen (when wet) wood: There are many things that can go wrong, which are the symptoms that can alert you to what the problem is. They include: Tightening or loosening of the strings, slipping/sticking pegs, open seams or cracks, buzzing/nasal/muted sounds, when the bow skates across the strings, a decreased response or projection of sound, or a change in the neck projection.

Weight increases. The sound of a stringed instrument changes because the wood is denser with moisture in humid conditions. What one buys in a violin maker’s shop does indeed change as soon as it travels somewhere.

The bigger the instrument, the bigger the effects. Because it is made of more wood, a bass or a cello will experience greater effects from changes in humidity/moisture than a violin.

Ideally, you would treat your violin the way museums treat great physical works of art. You would always maintain a set degree of humidity and temperatures. Unfortunately, musical performances and musicians exist in a bigger world; therefore the stringed instruments must find a way to travel to the ends of the earth.

This is why a few active measures by the musician might be undertaken. They include measuring the relative humidity of an environment with a tool called a hygrometer. But just measuring it is step 1. More importantly, you can control humidity by several means: run a humidifier (if it is too dry) or a dehumidifier (if it is too wet) in the space where you will be playing. For traveling, a humidifying Dampit might work (particularly useful in winter, when artificial heating systems are drying). But ideally, the violin will adjust to the local humidity - and the musician will adjust the instrument strings accordingly - when in a new environment for two or three days.

To gain a bit more insight into protecting an instrument from environment, a visit to a local violin shop should do the trick. A local violinmaker would stock proper cases, dampits and humidifiers among the accessories they stock.

Vivaldi may not have had the modern tools for reading humidity, nor did he have airplane travel to hasten the atmospheric changes. But he certainly appreciated the graduations in temperature and humidity over the course of four seasons that allow us to adapt more easily to Nature’s whims.

The Benefits to Children Who Learn String Instruments

Music study can lead to a rewarding career. But simply learning how to play a violin (or tuba or oboe) can positively affect development in many ways.

We go to a concert hall and see virtuoso musicians performing some of the most adored musical compositions on some of the finest violins and cellos and pianos ever made. It is difficult to imagine that at one point, these violinists and pianists - and flautists and bassists - were once novice players, taking lessons as children, and setting the timer to assure at least one hour of practice per day. But that’s how a great number of performers begin.

A considerable body of research has developed in recent decades on the cognitive, physical, and social benefits of childhood music education. Some of those benefits accrue from any musical instrument study, and some specifically come from learning to play a stringed instrument such as a violin, cello, bass, harp, or viola.

One of the leaders in this research and reporting is Chris Boyd Brewer, whose 1995 book Music and Learning continues to be a reference source on the power of childhood music lessons. She quotes Beethoven: “Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.”

Indeed, it contributes to an understanding of math - those notes on a page that represent beat, rhythm, and scales are a lesson in division, fractions, and patterns. It also contributes to an understanding of physics: the interaction of bows and strings involves friction and vibrations in a range of degrees. One need not be a violinmaker to understand these physical properties; the musician understands them from study and practice.

Musical training helps in all kinds of mental and even social development as well. How so? Brewer lists 16 benefits, including the following:

Change brain wave states - Research from the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto shows that fine movements made to create a sound, done with an unfamiliar instrument (a Tibetan singing bowl) created audio-induced brain waves that improved connectivity between auditory and sensorimotor areas of the brain. (Producing the same sound in this study from simply pressing computer keys didn’t have the same effect on brain waves.)

Focus concentration - Brewer says that mental, physical, and emotional rhythms are stabilized by music. “Baroque music - such as that composed by Bach, Handel, or Telemann, - that is 50 to 80 beats per minute creates an atmosphere of focus that leads students into deep concentration.”

Increase a multisensory learning experience - She calls this “whole brain learning,” and she sees benefits in what she calls “Active Concert” and “Passive Concert” modes. The Active version is of course what the player experiences, but even the Passive mode, listening to music while studying something else, increases information absorption.

Community building - By another description this is about the interaction of players - a band, ensemble, or orchestra - which involves the shared goals of a community that requires cooperation. They might compete, they might learn from each other, but importantly, they share a goal of creating the sound that an individual cannot create on his or her own.

Other benefits, noted by other educators, include having an enhanced application for colleges (in a competitive world, the musician has a leg up over the non-musician), better emotional health (music lowers levels of depression and anxiety), and a strong development of social skills (a music student is more likely to form friends when in a group than not in a group).

But consider the posture of the violinist relative to the kid hunched over a computer or in the permanent couch-potato slump of watching television. Indeed, the violinist learns to both sit and stand for practicing and performing, a physical advantage not typically associated with music study. Every instrument requires a certain posture for proper playing, but the violinist is very often the star of the show - and needs to look like it.

Maple Wood and the Acoustics of Violins

It takes several kinds of woods to make fine stringed musical instruments. But the back of the violin, made with maple, has much to do with sound resonance.

Students of the violin and violinmaking are generally aware that a fine violin – as well as cellos and violas – is made up of several types of wood. Maple is used for the body as is spruce (and the two are often in a spruce top arching-maple bottom combination), and ebony for the fingerboards. These are collectively referred to as “tone woods.”

With some variation fine stringed instruments have also been made of cedar, mahogany, and walnut. But going back to celebrated luthiers Stradivari and Guarneri, considered the most talented violinmakers of all time, maple has been considered the most prized and preferred wood for the violin body.

Why maple? To be clear, it’s not just any maple (but we’ll get to that in a moment). Maple offers the combination of sufficient weight, resonance, stiffness, and sturdiness needed to create beautiful music. As the bow is drawn across the strings of the instrument, the vibrations travel through the bridge to the top of the violin body. From there, those same vibrations travel through the sound post (usually made of spruce) to the bottom/back, then through the air and out the f-holes.

The reason that maple serves well in this capacity is it’s in the sweet spot between strength and resonance. It has the density – when the proper woods are selected – to serve those vibrations that begin with the violinist’s bow and end at the audience’s ears.

This wood comes from forests, of course, but there is a lot of interim time between the felling of a tree and the time when the violinmaker begins to work with it. Some of these craftspeople will visit the growing trees to select them, perhaps looking for maple grown in mountainous areas with a consistent and reliable climate and four seasons that temper the wood and provide it with a ring structure that is ideal for the back of a violin. That takes a great deal of foresight given how the wood is then cut into billets and is air aged (away from light and moisture). The aging process takes years, even as long as a decade, to allow sufficient drying.

And while the aesthetics of a violin might not be the first priority of the student, conductor, player, or audience member, all great violins have the shimmer, tiger-like skin that well-figured maple provides.

The selection of the wood is just the beginning of the work of the luthier. Months if not years go into making any type of fine stringed instrument. Some do it well, others less so. Factories can forge a cello, violin or viola largely without human hands, but they tend to use lesser woods and sell at a lesser price. Which is all well and good for the beginning student or the casual player. Suffice it to say well-handled tone wood (plus metal in the frog and horsehair in the strings) makes the violin.

The History of Standard Tuning: Who Standardized it, Why, and When?

The A note changed over the centuries due to concert hall architecture, instrument innovations, and the globalization of Western music.

Violin strings are typically tuned by setting the A string to 440 Hz. It’s a scientific metric applied to a tool of art, which in itself might seem odd. But just like pointillism was an optical tool used by Impressionistic painters, and physiology is essential to dancers, players of fine violins as well as all other instrumentalists need to be in tune. The hertz (Hz) unit of frequency, which measures the traveling wave (oscillation) of air pressure is one way to ensure a violin concerto in Vienna sounds the same in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and everywhere else.

But who set that standard? When? Why? The history is murky – violinmakers didn’t play a role, as violins, violas, and cellos are fairly adaptable to all circumstances – but it has a parallel in time zones and cross-continental railroad travel that began in the 19th century.

Prior to the 19th century time varied from village to village and country to country. But with the railroads, it became more important to have coordinated schedules for arrivals and departures. This is when standardized time zones came to be.

The analogy to musical standard tuning finds its forensics in old pipe organs and old tuning forks. Organs in Germany that were built prior to 1600 had the A above the middle C varying between 377 Hz to 567 Hz, roughly a half note above and below the current 440 Hz standard.

What changed this was the rise of the star composer-musicians Handel and Mozart, who themselves and their scores traveled farther than their predecessors in the 17th and 18th centuries. They favored a standard pitch of about 422-423 Hz. This was followed by improved building methods of concert halls that satisfied larger audiences in the 19th century, which coincided with the development of new and better instruments. To achieve “high, brilliant pitches at climaxes” (according to Lynn Cavanagh, A brief history of the establishment of international standard pitch a=440 hertz), which worked better in these bigger venues, wind and stringed instruments were built to a higher pitch standard.

It took the French to codify this, according to Cavanagh. “In 1859, a French government commission made A=435 Hz law in that country,” she writes. Still, British musicians didn’t exactly comply, nor did piano makers in North America, as they argued that room temperature rendered the French standard irrelevant.

Again, it was a technology, radio broadcasting, which drove an international agreement in 1939. Europe was in catastrophic turmoil during that period, so it’s interesting to note that consensus on the pitch of the A was at least achieved then. Today, it’s possible to get the standard pitch for the violin’s G, D, A, and E notes online and through phone apps.

Given all that happened in Europe in the 20th century, consider how some of those centuries-old German, French, British and other pipe organs may well hold a stubborn adherence to different, non-standard tuning. They might not fit musical tones a modern world but they give us a glimpse of what musical pitch was long ago.

Spruce Wood and the Acoustics of Violins

Spruce is a vital raw component of violins. A product of nature, there is great variability that skilled violinmakers understand how to control.

There are countless variables that affect the quality of music created by a skilled violinist and his or her violin. It is the talent, skill, and artistry of the violinist that seems most important. But how the violin is made, and of what materials, matter a great deal as well.

The great names in European violin making – Antonio Stradivari of course, but also Maggini, Stainer, Ruggieri, Amati, Guarneri, and Klotz come to mind – largely had one thing in common when crafting the fine violins produced in their shops: the wood used to craft their instruments. Therefore those woods defined the instrument from the beginning. It was that spruce and maple wood were the most available material to work with.

The argument that these two types of wood, which make up the bulk of any fine instrument, are the be-all to end-all in violin making is almost certainly flawed. The design and crafting of the instrument, as well as how they are played, may have conformed to the natural strengths of spruce and maple. If all a violinmaker had available in northern Italy was birch and oak, might violins (as well as fine cellos, and violas, etc.) look a bit different and sound a bit different – and be considered the norm?

That last question cannot really be answered. Suffice it to say that maple is revered for the soundpost, and spruce (in particular, European spruce or Picea abies) for the soundboard of body of the violin. In technical terms, the highest-grade violin spruce has a low density and what’s described as “a very high specific modulus of elasticity.” This amounts to “a small angle of microfibrils in cell walls, combined with a structure with a majority of axial cells, resulting in a high axial-to-shear and axial-to-transverse anisotropy (different properties that go in opposite directions),” according to a summary of research reported in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (“Acoustical properties of wood in string instruments soundboards and tuned idiophones: Biological and cultural diversity,” Iris Brémaud, Vol. 131, January 2012). This anisotropy affects the soundboard (spruce) vibration modes in ways that produce the sound we consider to be most desirable.

The woods used by Stradivari, et al. in the 15th century happened to have had a climate element to them: decades of colder temperatures in Italy, Switzerland and Germany led to slower growth of the spruce trees. In particular, the woods used in Cremonese violins are believed to have superior tonal expressiveness and projection, thanks to the density of the cold-grown spruce trees. It’s the wood’s vibrational efficacy and the effective production of sound that distinguish this rare and highly valued family of violins from others.

There are specialists who know how to identify old spruce trees that will make good violins (too many branches equal too many knots, for example). Finding the right trees is merely the starting point – and to be clear, those trees might be 400 years old – in the long process of creating the music that great violins and violinists give to the world.

W.E Hill & Sons: A Legacy of Quality and Vision

Very few fine stringed instrument shops master so much of what musicians need to produce fine music – and what collectors need to establish value.

Some people know W.E. Hill & Sons for their fine violin bows. Others for the fine cellos and violins the firm made during the late 19th and most of the 20th century. Auctioneers tout the firm for its restoration work and scholarship on the Stradivarius and Guarneri luthier families. And in the realm of fine violin cases, there really is no comparison to W.E. Hill & Sons for intricate craftsmanship and beauty.

The fact that very different perspectives of fine stringed instruments – from the players to collectors and scholars – all find ways to appreciate, respect and even revere the work of this firm speaks volumes. They were skilled with levels of expertise and breadth that is rarely found under one roof.
To illustrate the attention to detail, this shop reportedly made its own tools. It’s what enabled them to perform at the top of their game in all other respects, in particular at bow making. Consider how the market values W.E. Hill & Sons bows at recent auctions: In 2017 and 2018, viola, cello and violin bows have sold for between $1,298 and $18,788 (US). Prices fetched at auction for instruments were as high as $54,000 (cello), $26,400 (violin), $23,600 (violin), $16,851 (violin), and $16,571 (violin). Auction houses handling the maker’s work include Tarisio, Freeman’s Auctions, Bonhams, Skinner, and Ingles & Hayday.

Based in London on the fashionable New Bond Street, the violinmaker was established in 1887, the height of the Victorian era, a time when the English fine stringed instruments were thought to have surpassed the workmanship of those made in France.

This was also a time when elaborate, ornate violin cases were made by the Hill organization, one of which was sold at auction in 2016 for $17,220. This particular case was one of the firm’s fabled “12 Apostles,” so named because only a dozen were made over an eight-year period (1887-1895), and was commissioned to house a Stradivarius. Cases of this exceptional vintage were inlaid with exotic woods in music motives, with brass hardware, and lined with fine paper

The violinmaker was also acclaimed for its work with damaged instruments, as well as their mastery at identification and authentication of violins, cellos, and bows. The firm handled at least three Stradivariuses (the Alard, the Messiah, and the Lipinski).

The violin shop’s legacy was honored with a special exhibit at the Bate Collection at the University of Oxford of W.E. Hill & Sons bows in 2016. Titled “Fiddle Sticks, the Story of Bow Making at Hills Violin Experts,” it included 17 bows from the firm that were made over a period of 75 years. Bow making tools and moulds, a recreated workshop, plus a short film, biographies of acclaimed luthiers in Hill’s employ and several photographs were part of the exhibit as well.

The firm was dissolved in 1992, capping off more than a century of fine craftsmanship, investigative authentication, and restoration work. Today, almost everything W.E. Hill & Sons touched carries great respect – and value.