It's all in the wood...
 

A good article about Stradivarius violins and the importance of wood - info directly applicable to acoustic guitars...the point about less moisture content is particularly good...

Happy Holidays!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/sc...an-region&_r=0

bookmarked for later :)

Thats a very interesting article bitraker..In relation to us Acoustic folk.Thanks for the link!

Well my guitar get better with age : D

A couple of take away points for me are:
"Because hemicellulose naturally absorbs a lot of moisture, the effect was that the instruments had about 25 percent less water in them than more recent models.This is fundamentally important because the less moisture, the more brilliant the sound." - I like the sound of my guitar when it is dryer than average and hate it, I would quit if it sounded that way, when its more moist.

“Top violinists often feel like these old violins vibrate more freely." - This speaks to construction. Lighter bracing and bridges with stiffer/heavier necks.

What it doesn't seem to mention is how often Stradivarius violins have failed in direct side by side comparisons with modern instruments, when listened to by top notch violinists in double blind tests. The study and article are proceeding on the (actually rather dubious) assumption that, yes, Stradivarius violins are ALWAYS better and that there's actually some "secret" about them.

If you delve a little further and deeper into the article, you'll find that the lead scientist was inspired to undertake the study by a meeting with the notorious Professor Nagyvary, who is a Stradivarius obsessive who has been promoting one "secret" to the sound of these instruments after another. For a while Nagyvary believed that there was urine in the varnish Stradivarius used, so he put plastic buckets in the mens room at Texas A&M University, where he taught, so that students could pee into the buckets and contribute to his "research" that way.

Later, Nagyvary was convinced that it was chitin (the substance that makes up insect exoskeletons) in the varnish that gave them their sound, so he was boiling crickets and Junebugs up in vats and using the resulting glop to coat violins in the white that he'd purchased. (Nagyvary himself has never made a violin, though he'll tell you otherwise.)

Every five or ten years or so Nagyvary "discovers" yet another "secret" to the sound of Stradivarius. The logs floating in seawater is another one of the theories he's advanced, and this latest study seems to have been inspired by that.

Here's the true "secret" to the "mysterious" excellence of Stradivarius violins: Stradivarius himself was an excellent craftsman who made superb instruments. What's more, he lived into his 90's, and was an active builder making great violins for many decades.

So there are a lot of existing Strad violins, cellos and even a couple of guitars still floating around. They're really well-made.

But the idea of Strads as having this mythical level of perfection never achieved before or since is much more a creation of market forces than anything else. Yes, they're great violins. But there's no secret to it. They were very well-made, and a lot of them were built and - more importantly - preserved for future generations.

For a while I got into turn-of-the-20th Century parlor guitars: Martins, Washburns, Lyon & Healys, Brunos, and what have you. When I delved into the history of these instruments, something that I found interesting was that Lyon & Healy, under its own brand name and others like Washburn, probably made ten guitars for every one that Martin made. Yet if you look at what's out there on the market these days, there are probably ten 1890's Martins for every Lyon & Healy or Washburn from the same era.

The reason is that Martin was a name that even non-musicians knew meant excellent quality, so when a non-guitarist inherited Grandpa's old Martin, it got taken care and handed down, mostly on the assumption that it must be very, very valuable.

Lyon & Healy and Washburn guitars? Not so much: "Oh, that old thing. Little Jimmy is interested in music; let's let him play on it."

The same thing happened to the many other violins that were made at the same time as the Strads: they didn't have the same cachet, so they weren't treasured. As a result, they haven't survived the passage of time in the same way.

Anyway, over the decades Nagyvary has managed to generate one news article after another about whatever "secret to the Stradivarius sound" he's discovered THIS time, and in this case he indirectly managed to generate yet another one.

Just as many people choose to believe that there's a Loch Ness Monster lurking in the deeps of that tectonic rift lake, and don't want to hear any of the science that proves otherwise, there's a resistance by most folks to the idea that something as legendary as Stradivarius violins aren't actually as unique as we want to believe.

So that study proceeded on a flawed premise, namely that those violins are inexplicably unique. They're not. They're great instruments, but there's no mystery to it.


Wade Hampton Miller

I read that test, the only thing it proved was that violinist preferred the sound of modern instruments.

There have been numerous double blind tests, and the Strads generally do pretty well but have never won every time. This study mentioned in the article was proceeding from the assumption that Strads ARE the best and that nobody questions that assumption. Well, I do question that assumption, and so do many others, especially people who make their living playing violin.

Again, I'm not denigrating the quality of Stradivarius violins, but the status they've achieved in our culture has gone way past anything that can be definitely proven in terms of their functionality. They're the ultimate status symbol among musical instruments. My point is that this mystique has built more upon previous attitudes towards these violins than it has on the violins themselves.

So I stand by what I wrote earlier in this thread: the scientific study proceeded from a flawed assumption, which is an unquestioned belief that these violins are the best that have ever been made, and probably the best that ever will be.

I disagree with that assumption, as do many others.


Wade Hampton Miller

There's a great book on the history of a few Strad's that discussed how the UK company Hill & Sons hyped Strads as part of their own marketing, which led to their ascendancy over Guarneri, Amati, etc.

Look, bottom line: a few violins are top tier. Within that, individuals pick their preference. Pricing Strads at a super-premium is no different than pricing a '57 Les Paul Goldtop at X and a '59 Les Paul sunburst at 3x.

I dont know anything about violins but I do know dryer is better for my guitar and the more the top vibrates the more sound it puts out.

Yes, that's the long version of what I wrote, wasn't disagreeing w/ you.

What most interested me was
"The researchers also discovered that one-third of a wood component known
as hemicellulose had decomposed in Stradivari and Guarneri’s instruments.
Because hemicellulose naturally absorbs a lot of moisture, the effect was that the instruments had about 25 percent less water in them than more recent models."

I am guessing the two instruments were left in the same environment for the
the right amount of time before testing.
And they were built to the same specs (recent models) ?

Merry Christmas while it still is over there!

He also had many family members and apprentices who were employed within the business and who contributed the lion's share of the labor ( under supervision) in the vast majority of the instruments bearing his name.

In which respect, a "Stradivarius" violin is somewhat analogous to a "Rembrandt" painting.

Not that I am in any way an expert on the merits of various violins, but I have been fortunate to have been acquainted with many such experts over the course of my life, and the over-riding impression I come away with is not that Strads are somehow "better" (whatever that might mean) than del Gesus or Amatis or any of the other Cremonese instruments, but that their outstanding property is their ability to "carry" significantly further (unamplified) than any other violin in a concert hall.

I doubt that any scientific test has ever been carried out ( or could even be carries out) to determine whether this is in fact true or not ... you would need to carry it out somewhere like Carnegie Hall, with a full audience, and have a concert violinist play several Cremonese violins unamplified, and have sophisticated recording gear at the back of the hall. The variables are just too many.

This "projection" phenomenon however is undoubtedly real, at least in the realm of acoustic guitars. ... I have owned many, many high end guitars in my time, and have played them all in public, ( in admittedly small compared to Carnegie Hall rooms) . Some have attracted comments regarding how well they could be heard from the back of the room, and others have not. FTR, the guitar which attracted the most (unsolicited) comments regarding the projection, was an Ed Claxton OM which I owned around three years ago. people at the back felt as though the guitar was directly in front of them.

The point I am making is that both guitars and violins can sound great (or not) to the player, but to the audience at the back, the impression can be totally different.

Lots of nice infos in that thread.

I'll add that when I was an apprentice in violin making at Mirecourt in the 70's, a common joke about Strad violins was that there was more glue than wood in them. Meaning that, along the centuries, they had been broken and repaired numerous times.

Stradivarius was a hard worker, had a big family to feed, lot of helpers during his career, so his production was greater than what his contemporaries produced in Cremona at the time. It is also said that, among the 400 or so known Stradivarius violins in use today, probably 200 are fake. Real fake or made by his descendance who worked with him, this is unsure.

Now the Strad 1721 model has been a solid reference in violin making during 2 centuries.
In any case, Stradivarius is a strong brand.