What Does The Fox Say?

[Drubunneh]

So sorry you lost a great man hon

I know the feels

My grandfather was the best, always happy so long his grandchildren were happy. He took us to great places and told us we were amazing and always greeted us with an enthusiastic "Wotcha!"

much love hon

[Ashtyn]

Thanks Dru!

[Aryn Gentlepaw]

Sorry to hear of your loss, Fox *hugs you softly* I remember my grandpa fondly too. Which is why I am very happy that some of his memory lives on now with you having his violin.

[Ashtyn]

Today we had our winter concert with the strings ensemble I play with!

I won't lie, it was a bit of a mess! But probably if you don't know what's missing you won't ever notice it! 

But we had all sorts of problems, from people's music falling off the stand, to our conductor starting us when we weren't ready, to missing one of our members who's sick with the flu, to people losing their place... During the 1812 Overture, the Cellos and 2nd Violins got all out of sync (and I mean ALL! Everyone was playing a different thing!), and while thankfully we pulled together, I actually broke into a cold sweat and had to use the 'curl your toes' technique to keep from fainting as I heard everybody around me going in each and every direction! And I'm going to be bold here and say I was playing right, because I fixed my eyes on the conductor because I couldn't understand what was going on, and I at least was on the right tempo! 

Aaaaalso, I played this one on the violin Aryn & Athian sent me and I restored, because I had some sweet piano (soft) passages and that violin does piano and pianissimo wonderfully!

Anyway, here's a link to the video if anyone wants to watch. It was a short concert, only 30 minutes.

https://youtu.be/m5l124KziiQ

[Ausar]

Thanks for sharing the video with us. I am currently listening to it.

[Ashtyn]

I've been diving pretty deep on my violin restoration hobby! The violin Aryn gave me was 'patient zero'. This is now officially Number One, the first fully restored one!

It was a broken pile of wood when I got it. It was a very low quality late-1800's German-made violin (probably from Schönbach), the outside looks Ok but the insides were given no care at all when they made it. So! I took it apart, re-did a whole bunch of its bits and pieces the way it's supposed to be properly made, and here it is! I call it the Orange Strad, because of its blaring orange color. Tenaar said Fiona was a better name, but the working title of Orange Strad has stuck. 

And I got an audio clip of my teacher playing it...

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/Meditation_from_Thais_Orange_Strad.mp3


It sounds good in the hands of someone who knows how to play it, but it's not without quirks, or as some would call it, 'character'.    Your intonation has to be spot-on, and takes a bit of work to coax the sound smoothly out of it. But given that most violins do have 'character' and in most cases that means terrible shortcomings you need to deal with, I'm happy with how this one turned out, specially being my first one!   

[Ashtyn]

This was the second violin I completed restoration! This one I tried really hard to keep as close to simply 'restoring' instead of 'rebuilding', but it sounded just so terrible when I first got it, I decided I would make this into a good sounding violin as part of bringing it back to life!

I call it the Fake Vuillaume because it has a J.B. Vuillaume (famous French maker - Google it!) label in it, but it obviously isn't a real one.

This one has an interesting story to it:
  This violin was given to the son of a freed slave here in Virginia at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation (1862). The former slaves continued to work for the farmer as free men then, and the one who got the violin was best buddies with the farmer's son, which was highly controversial here at the time, because imagine befriending someone of a different skin color! The outrage! *sarcasm!*
  They remained friends their whole lives, and the black man who had the violin kept it his whole life too.

It was found recently in the former servants' quarters still in that same farm, by one of the descendants of the original farmer, and she gave it to me because she learned that I restore these things.

It was in terrible shape when I got it: The neck had broken off at some point in the past and been improperly glued back on. It had scuffs and chips missing, but amazingly, no cracks! The interior was grotesquely made and I took upon myself to improve it to the best of my ability. Also, this is a 3/4 size violin, not a full size (4/4) one.

All things considered, I think it came out pretty good for a 3/4 (they are usually crap because they are intermediary sizes that children use when learning before they grow big enough for a full size one - some people of small stature also use 3/4 but good ones are extremely rare).

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/Meditation_from_Thais_Fake_Vuillaume.mp3

Here's Amy playing the Meditation from Thais again. She makes it sound wonderful, but she agrees with me it's a bit of a workout to play on it, in part because you have to compensate for the fact that it's smaller so the notes are not exactly where you expect them to be. 

[Ashtyn]

And here's Number Three, I call this one the 'Butt Strad', because of its prominent posterior! I mean, look at that...

Normal violin profile (the 'Orange Strad')	The 'Butt Strad'!

This violin was originally made sometime in the late 1800's in Schönbach, and it was crap. Ironically, after I messed with it, this one is the one I'm most pleased with, even with its quirks.

It had a horrible horizontal grain-failure crack on the back (butt crack? heheheheh!), that required a patch. And because of the weirdness of the grain on that area, it absorbed the pigments in an unexpected way, so instead of a beautiful invisible repair we got an ugly smudge, but oh well! The sound totally makes up for it!


This violin has a powerful sound, it's clear and rich, and has amazing low register. Here's my teacher Amy playing it, because she knows how to make it sound its best:

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/Meditation_from_Thais_Butt_Strad.mp3

And another one of a piece she composed herself, because the sound of this one is really good and I want to show off! 

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/Amys_Piece_Butt_Strad.mp3


Aside from patching and closing cracks, I re-did the graduations on the top of this violin, which was terrible, but interestingly the back was extremely well done, aside from its weird bulge on the lower bout. My previous two, I did the graduations according to what some researchers believe is what gives ancient Italian violins their legendary tone. This one I blatantly copied what Stradivari did to one of his violins. I guess old man Strad still knows best! 

This might actually be one of my favorite violins to play, because it feels just right, and the sound is so nice, though it is loud! It can leave my ears ringing after a long session of playing in fortissimo.

I had plans to replace the fingerboard, this one it currently has is made of some lower grade of ebony that has been painted over to look evenly black. But I didn't want to do it until I knew if the sound of the violin was going to be worthwhile, and now that I love the way it sounds I'm afraid of changing anything on it in case I mess up the way it sounds - yes, violins are that fickle! Change one little thing and you can ruin it!

[Ashtyn]

And now we interrupt the lovely and delicate violin restoration posts, for something much more disgusting and violent!

We intended to do some renovations here on the house, the living room was very dated and the carpet was crappy and gross and it was time for a change! So the idea was to take out the wooden paneling we had on the walls, and rip off the carpet, and put wood floor instead.

I always say there is a rule when doing renovation work, that any time you open up walls, you will find something wrong that needs fixing. So, as I was taking out the wood paneling, I noticed behind the wall under one of the windows there was a lot of mold and actual rotting on the exposed wood! I took it further apart and found that the morons who installed the window there didn't wrap the wall, didn't wrap the window frame, didn't caulk, didn't do anything basically to keep water from coming into the house! So one part of the wall was plain simply rotting away!

This is a view from the outside after I removed some of the siding covering the rotting wall.

There are two windows in this room that were installed by the same people, and on both of them they screwed up! The other window however sits under a roof on the porch side of the house so it didn't get water to come in directly, but also needed to be properly sealed!

The rotting wall however, needed to be completely demolished and rebuilt!

Here is the hole on the house after Tye and I knocked down the rotting wall with me still tearing some of it off.

So after that wall was demolished a new one needed to be built! That took the entire day and was exhausting!

Still needs insulation, and the siding to be put back up on the outside.

...but we got it done! Now I can start doing the work I originally set out to do!

[Ashtyn]

Back to the normal programming now, some more violin stuff! 

As I'm slowly building up to resume my jewelry work, I decided I will want to make some videos documenting how some things are made. And for practice, I have put together a slideshow video of how my Orange Strad violin was restored!

I got the materials together and made a rough draft of how I wanted it, and Ani put it all together with his video-making skillz00rzs!


https://youtu.be/TkRmeaB2YUU


The violin is being played by my teacher, who is strangely anti-technology (seriously, the most she has in terms of electronics is a flip phone from circa 2005), so she asked not to be credited on a video that was going into this crazy modern technological thing called Internet-YouTube-Cloud-Thing! ...maybe she thinks it will steal her soul or something if her name is put there...

I'm happy with it how it came out for our first video, it's a good learning start and hopefully we'll make nicer ones still as time goes on!

[Ashtyn]

Number Four was a bit different of a project.

It came to me shattered into many, many pieces, that had been improperly patched in the past. So I had to first of all put it all together. When I put it all together and took measurements I found out there was nothing I could do with the graduations on the top or back, they were already carved out really thin. So whatever this violin was, it was gonna have to do without me meddling with its plates! So this one was truly a restoration work, nothing modified or enhanced, just brought back into playing order!

This one is called the 'Conservatory Violin' because that's what it was branded from the original maker, again from the Dutzendarbeit industry at the end of the 19th century.

And of course the obligatory clip of Amy playing it...

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/Meditation_from_Thais_Conservatory_Violin.mp3


This one in the hands of a good player sounds pretty good, but it has some notorious frequencies that overlap, not hard enough to create a wolf tone ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_6r0kk2nE ), so all they do is make some specific notes seem 'bigger' than others. That's a quirk a luthier can go mad trying to fix so it's accepted simply as character of the instrument.

[Ashtyn]

And now for something completely different!

This is an old French cello, circa 1900, that we found at an antique store here in Richmond. At the time, it was in terrible condition, with lots of cracks on the top, big chips on the edges, and improper repairs on the inside. And a horrendous rib crack at the bottom which normally would be a death sentence because they are horrendously expensive to have a professional luthier fix. But it had a nice old German bow ducktaped to the back of the cello, and that's what caught my attention! But they wouldn't sell us only the bow, so we paid $30 for the whole thing! 

I thought if nothing else there was more than $30 in wood alone in that thing that I could use for other projects - yes, it was in such bad shape that I considered scraping it! But upon some research, I found out that was actually a rather valuable cello, so I took the route of restoring it. Took me about 5 months of on-and-off work to bring the cello into playing condition, and do the cosmetic repairs.

And it sounds sublime! I don't play the cello at all, so I had some cellists at the orchestra try it out. Their expert opinion is that it's a very responsive, very resonant, wonderfully even and easy to play instrument. ...and they all want it! 

I put A LOT of work on this one, but I think the part I'm most happy with and most proud of is the varnish. It still had the original varnish and after 100 years it had a marvelous patina and crackle effect that's just not possible to replicate, so it had to be preserved, while the damaged parts were restored. I made a special blend of restoration varnish specifically for this and the results came out better than expected!

I asked one of our cellists to play something on it so I could have the obligatory audio clip...

http://www.sculptyworks.com/Images/Forums/Blog/French%20Cello%20Sample%20-%20Bach%20Suite%201%20in%20G%20-%20Gigue.mp3

Not bad for my first restored cello! And while it gave me no unexpected troubles at all during restoration, I don't look forward to restoring other cellos, they are too big and unwieldy! ...but if I find another bargain like this, I know I won't turn it down! 

[Ani]

[Ashtyn]

Today we had our summer concert with the strings ensemble I play with! We played at St. Francis Home, a retirement home for low/no income elderly folks. They were very happy to have us!

I had the camera placed where I wanted it (where I would appear on the video!), but Tye moved it to let someone on a wheelchair pass, and then he put it in a completely different place, where I'm totally obscured by another player 90% of the time!   

At least I appear on this photo - I'm the one in red as usual!

Here's a link if anyone wants to watch it:

https://youtu.be/nAr5EtJETDk


This one was better than the last one.   
...still little issues here and there but it's acceptable. 

[Ashtyn]

The renovations on the living room have been done for a while now, but getting all the furniture in place and decor and all that still took a while. Today I deemed it 'good enough' and took some photos to show off the results of the hard work and frustration dealing with all the crap I had to deal with on that project!

Most of the stuff is Tye's mom's, though I exercised my veto power on everything that went into the living room and where it got put, so I'm technically the decorator-in-chief.