Workshop Notes: A New Violin pt. 1
When does a violin stop being a violin and become… something else?
I’m playing with the form of a violin a little with my next instrument: a 5-string-sort-of-cornerless violin. That’s not a particularly catchy or marketable title for it though, so I’m taking suggestions.
For now, I'll refer to it as my 5-string. I’ve been wanting to make a 5-string violin for a little while, mostly because of the challenges involved in doing it well. I’ve had a few 5-strings come across my workbench, and they’ve often struck me as quite, well, clunky. They don’t seem very comfortable in their skin, as though they're not quite sure if they’re a viola or a violin.
The wide neck and long scroll – to accommodate the extra string – can throw the rest of the body a little off balance visually. The C and the E require different things to get them sounding well too, so it can be hard to get an even tone across all the strings.
Here are the parameters I’ve given myself:
I have a few folk festivals coming up that I’d like this ready for, so I want to be able to make it quickly and thus sell it at a price that is a little lower than my standard rate
The design needs to look cohesive and comfortable with itself
It needs to have an even sound across all the strings
It needs to be comfortable to play and with the same string lengths as a violin so that a violinist can easily switch to it
Initially, I thought I was going to go full-cornerless. My logic was to get rid of the damn corners, as they take up too much time to make. I drew myself an outline and got halfway through making the mould. Then, (with some help from my partner’s eagle eyes) realised that I’d already made a catalogue of errors that would mean I wasn’t fulfilling half of my parameters. The length was on the small side, so the neck/fingerboard was going to look odd against it. The c-bouts were very narrow, so combined with the small length, the sound was likely to be too shallow, and the cornerless design I’d drawn just wasn’t cutting it, it looked odd.
There are some nice cornerless models out there, but what I’d drawn up was obviously an attempt to – pardon the pun – cut corners. So I went back to square one and made myself listen to myself this time.
To try and get some inspiration, I spent more time looking at baroque instruments – which come in all sorts of whacky shapes. I was drawn to the bouts of this old English viola da gamba:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38c5de8d-76fb-40fe-a68a-a5c182368072_900x1200.jpeg)
But I also wanted to keep the general upper and lower bout shape of a violin where possible, so I decided to go halves: keep some allusion to corners on the bottom, and round off the top.
Here’s what I’ve settled on, with some tweaking still to do:
The next design phase is the neck/scroll. I have some ideas about how to make that chunky neck feel nice under the hand and how to make the scroll lightweight, quick to make and still visually appealing, but more on that to come.
Looking forward to seeing it progress!