This violin is a commission from a young player whose family have been renting a 3/4 size violin from me. We chatted about what sort of model would suit her – she has quite small hands so we were thinking a slender instrument with a slim neck. One of her musical interests is baroque music, so mulling it over I thought it might be appropriate and fun to pick a Peter Guarneri of Venice model, which would tick all the relevant boxes.
Peter of Venice was the brother of the more famous Giuseppe Guarneri, nicknamed ‘del Gesu’ to distinguish him from his father, also Giuseppe . Peter of Venice instruments have character – slightly squarish scrolls with beautiful toolmarks in the volute, a distinctive outline and quite full high arching which I think will help give us the sound we’re looking for.
Before I started work, I paid a visit to my good friend and colleague William Castle, who is a big Peter of Venice fan, and who lent me lots of information. I decided to use an outline he had, a violin he measured years ago from the 1740s, with a very pretty, slender outline reminiscent of the Amati family. William didn’t have much more information on this one, so for a lot of the rest of the violin I’m taking my inspiration from another Peter of Venice dated 1735.
A new outline means a new mould, and as I’ve been doing recently, I’m using some beautiful walnut, which was traditional for moulds in the 18th century, as it’s easy to work and very stable.
The ribs are made from maple, sawn from the back so that it’s a perfect match. I bend them and glue round the mould. The final picture shows the linings glued in place – these are little strips of spruce that fit against the ribs and increase the eventual gluing surface against the back and front.
While the glue joints of the ribs are drying, I’ve got on with the scroll. There are lots of things I like about this model – the elegant shape of the pegbox and the delicate eye with the tool marks leading up to it like spokes of a wheel.
Then it’s time to move to the back and front. At this stage the violin really feels under way. The wood we chose for the back is a lovely, well figured piece of maple that I bought in France some years ago. I’ve paired it with a high quality piece of spruce for the front, which comes from the Fiemme valley in Northern Italy, where Stradivari also sourced his wood. A few years ago there was a terrible storm that felled a lot of the spruce trees, and I contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to save as many as possible. This piece of wood was from the resulting harvest. Using planes of different sizes, I’ve roughed the shape of the arching from the solid pieces of wood, and finalised the outlines with reference to the finished rib assembly.
The next stage is to fit the purfling, which is made from a sandwich of pear wood dyed black with a central strip of poplar. I cut a groove round the edge of the plates, remove the waste wood from the middle, then bend and trim the purfling strips before gluing in place.
I’m ready now for one of my favourite parts of making the violin; finalising the arching. I start by finishing the hollow in the area of the purfling, then plane and scrape the arching to the final shape.
Then I flip over the wood and hollow out the underside. How thick it ends up is different for each violin; I take in to consideration the arching shape, wood density, weight, stiffness, the sound the wood makes when tapped and actual measurements. When everything is in balance, it’s done. I like to rough out the f-holes on the front before the thicknessing is finished, so that I can get an accurate feel for the stiffness of the plate.
And with the thicknessing completed, I can finalise the f-hole shape. On this model, they are graceful and sinuous.
It’s exciting to reach the final stages of putting the body of the violin together. I’ve fitted the bass bar, which reinforces the lower register of the violin and helps support the weight of the strings over the bridge. Then the ribs come off the mould, I finish the internal surfaces and glue the ribs to the back, then the front to the ribs.
Then I fit the neck, a complex joint where I have to consider the angle so that it produces the correct bridge height, that it runs centrally down the body and that it’s set in sufficiently to give the correct measurement for the length of neck. It’s actually a job I rather enjoy. That done, I spend time making as comfortable a neck shape as possible, and then the violin is finished ‘in the white’, ready for varnishing.
