obsessed by the golden ground

The last post about my former self mentioned that  some old images of instruments were lost, but now some are found. There may not be a particular interest in them, but like in that last post, I include them to keep as a digital record of a particular mission that I was on at the time.

When beginning with violin family instruments I made and used a particular varnishing system well-known to those luthiers who like to create their own finishes. It was a spirit  based system from a recipe dating back to the early 1700's, and it used several gums,  oils and lacs. It had the advantage of being quick to dry and fairly hard wearing (in the absence of alcohol) and was commercially useful, but the ground under the varnish never looked right.

  By about 2002 I was becoming very interested in the performance of the coatings as they combined with the engineering and thicknessing of the plates, because it was obvious that if you go to a lot of trouble to get a certain set of tap tones from the plates, and if the structure of the arches and the thicknesses are all managed to produce a certain sound then the coatings that go over the top of all that will need to be considered too, in their capacity to help or hinder vibrations.

This led to a lot of research into the very old ways of doing things, and rather than looking for a 'secret' (which everyone seems to think is at the bottom of great instrument sound) I read up on the trades and traditions of the guild workers who had such an influence all over Italy- The Byzantine Greeks, who revolutionised almost all trade work before the renaissance. I'm not going to try to summarise that whole story, but it became obvious that many trades shared a set of procedures in the application of coatings, including furniture makers, guilders, carriage builders, church fitters, instrument makers amongst others. 

One of the reasons that there was commonality amongst them was fashion. The fashion for a gold appearance either as a finish, or as a reflective surface under a translucent finish. This is the quality that underlies the great Italian violin family masterpieces. The effect is a consequence of practical considerations as well as visual ones, and by identifying the common materials used in the ground layer (the solid base upon which the coloured layers are placed) it was possible to create a more golden, sparkly, subtle, impossible to photograph sensibly without looking like a complete nutter, and dependable surface that could be relied upon to be a consistent contributor to stiffness in the vibrating plates (the back and the belly)

The down side was that this stuff needed to be built into  oil based coatings, and I ended up applying them with thumbs rather than a brush, and they took a long time to dry. I had to make a UV drying cupboard, but the system still took as long to do as it took to build the instrument. But it did look lovely under lighting from different directions....and these pics were my attempts to capture on film what excited my eyes so much, but of course they end up just looking like a bunch of violins.

The conception of a fine instrument is much more than an accurate outline. A beautiful varnish is more than a pleasant colour. Successful arching can only function in a direct relationship to  the thicknessing and the varnish. A well cut f hole is conceived with reference to arch, outline, body length, placement and it's effect on the resonant frequencies of the corpus. Masterful work holds these things and others in harmonic balance.

 A fellow, now deceased, called Koen Padding was a revelatory figure in my journey and he supplied products that made it all possible. A wonderful mind now remembered in this story.

Some of my stash of very old hand cut and air dried Bosnian maple. Just gorgeous...These are  for one-piece backs that you will spot in a couple of the violins pictured above.

I found this little slideshow originally made around 2005 I think (although I have shortened it in case there are people out there who don't like looking at paint drying)....but if you do, then try it on a big screen so you can become bored in real style.

the sensations of making

This is spruce, from a log in the Italian Alps, stored for years to stabilize it's dimensions and it's moisture content, then split radially with a blade and mallet into wedges for the violin making trade in such a way that we are able to have the grain vertical, strong and straight. By the time I've used it, it has been kept at least five years more in the workshop.

Here the beginnings of a violin belly are being rough shaped with a broad gouge, across the grain rapidly to form the major arch of the instrument. This experience is physical, but it is also very sensory, even sensual. The spruce has an aroma, a clean and natural fragrance that seems attractive to every client who ever stumbled in while this work is happening. It makes a beautiful sound even while being gouged, and we learn to respond to it's differing tones as feedback from the removal of material. It has a surface sheen even on the ribbons of waste, and of course the growth rings make emphatic stripes on the work as evidence of the time it took for the tree to grow, and of the truth (or not) in the shapes we are carving.

This is all so beautiful it almost sounds too precious or twee to write about it; so romantically old-fashioned and so irrelevant to the realities of the present. I only write it to celebrate the simple sensations in the making of an example of an object that has made music for us for so long, and maybe to grizzle that we seem as cultures so removed now from simple sensations -because they have been rendered inefficient by manufacturing processes. Viva inefficiency.

(click on the pic for a big version to see the sheen on the curly bits)

boat work..Navigator progress

Having established the bottom rocker shape and fitted the keelson, the structure to support the cockpit bulkheads is attached to the floor and to the cockpit seat front panels. Transom has been glued too.
Bulkheads 1 and 2 are glued and the whole thing looks most unlikely for a boat...that's part of the joy actually- the transformation of a kit of complicated parts into sub-assemblies, and the combination of these into , well, assemblies...and the cumulation of assemblies into bits of a boat- and on the way there are some lovely curves, and pleasant views through holes, not to mention some haunting cast shadows.

The whole method of plywood boat building is in a way the total antithesis of the methods I use and love in traditional violin making. Where traditionally we deal with moisture and rot and fungus and swelling and movement and shrinkage by making sacrificial joints and using only organic reversible glues, and vapor-permeable coatings, and grain-orientation selected for stability- in modern plywood boats we use encapsulation within an epoxy (plastic) skin to keep moisture and it's associated problems permanently locked out, and alternating grain in the ply to keep things from changing size and shape in response to its exposure to the weather. The major benefit of this technology is that it enables us to keep boats in or out of the water without causing the sort of problems that traditionally built hulls suffer from. In short- we can keep them in a shed without them shrinking and leaking when they go back to the water.