Violin Forum/Message Board

[jethro]

Working now with Violino strings- which are nice and dark sounding- which
I like. I had noticed that this violin seemed to like a thick bridge on the
first bridge attempt. I also noticed that leaving the upper part of the bridge thick seemed to geve me lots of darkness, so here is what I did
kind of just to see what would happen. Bridge blank (aubert 3 star),
ground bottom of feet, cut top of feet, cut underarch, opened side holes
out a lotand up a little, lowered bottom of heart a little , cut top profile
( a little generious to allow for later adjustments) I left the bottom parts full thickness and cut the ankles on the curved sided and not on the flat sided. I cut my ankles pretty thin (maybe 1/8 inch.) . Then I tested the sound without trimming the top edge at all. Very Very dark but you could tell it was smothering the strings. So I thinned the top just a tiny bit.
Now only Very dark but that freed up the strings just enough to start getting a more normal vollume. All the notes in the first position that my
hand could reach sounded awesome. But I noticed when I tried to play
the notes for a scale an octive up on the fingerboard the notes up there
sounded kind of muffled and restricted. (washingtub sound ? )
So I thinned the top edge a little more and that released the sound all the
way up the soundboard . the down side is that the last trim while it fixed
the upper notes I lost a lot of my darkness down in the first position and
the open strings. I also noticed that A string was less dark than the others. The A was allmost Neutral in darkness where the others were still
noticeably dark. ( I think I have a major plate or body resonance at the
open A string as it is louder than the other strings.

Here is the question from this experiment. My attempt to get a dark bridge seemed like the thick top causing darkness and having it thin enough to get the upper notes free seemed to be "pulling" in opposite directions ! This would seem to limit the ammount of darkness by using this cutting scheme. Is this a correct way to get darkness ? Or is
there a correct way I have not discovered yet that everyone else knows
about ?????

I get the impression that having a heavy top section leaves the mass
high enough that the heavy top can't respond fast enough to the high
frequencys and thereby filters out some of the high frequencys. This
might be why the upper fingerboard noted are restricted ?
Perhaps this Darkness is achieved by filtering out some of the high
harmonics leaving the frequency distribution bigger in the lower end.

I initialy tried a thin bridge. That made a thin, loud piercing tone which
didn't seem warm or dark at all.

Any thoughts on where to trim to get darkness without shutting off the
notes on the upper positions ?

Tim

[jessupe goldastini]

to get darkness i just wait for the their next album to come out...

i think you could cut many bridges for many violins and you would achieve different results based on the varience between ALL the factors that go into each individual component of each peice of wood...

the qauntum qaulity and "ringtone" of the bridge blank has much more to do with it than your shaping

i feel its as random as sound post placment, little left, little right, forward , back, it will be different everytime...

in my opinion...