This site has something for you if you are either making a violin or you want to improve a low cost violin or viola.

By tuning the top & back plates you can get a good instrument that responds well to the bow and that can sound like a £1500 instrument.

Who are we?

  My name’s Jonathan, and I’ve been playing violin and lately viola as an amateur for some 50 years now, and rebuilding violins and violas for 10 or more. Over the last 3 or 4 years the odd violin or two for rebuilding has become the 30 or more - as I discovered eBay. Not one single violin among them was a Stradivarius: the labels were definitely lying.

I got an Engineering Degree from Cambridge in the early 1970’s. I trained first as a teacher and taught secondary science, maths and Physics for several years, and ever since then I’ve been working in electronics, telecoms and sales.

Here’s a picture of me, disguised as Pantomime Dame, with my mother-in-law Grannie Peg Jones, who died at Easter ‘07, a couple of months after this was taken. Lovely lady: we miss her.

  And here’s a picture of my daughter Suzy when she got her BSc at Bangor in July ‘08. That’s me and my wife Katie being very proud of her.

So now we’ve 3 children with degrees that we’re very proud of. And all degrees that are better than mine. I’m not bitter.

So what is the basis for claiming setting up tap-tones in front and back plates works?

Of the 30+ low-cost violins (and violas) I have, so far I’ve modified 8. These are of all sorts: a German Maggini copy, a JTL ‘Medio Fino’ stamped ‘Steiner, a D Hopf copy bench fiddle (transitional *) of the early 1800’s, a lions head German (transitional *) fiddle also early 1800’s, a German Stainer copy, a 7/8ths Christian Meisel (1930), and a good Mittenwald, with very dark varnish that once had a severed peg-box. These violins now have a known, matched ‘stiffness factors’ on front and back.

These first 8 do verify that Dr. Harris’s ‘formula’ really works, and can be applied to pretty much any violin to produce a fine sounding, playable instrument with a fairly predictable tone.

I have started to document them (see Example Violins) to show how the tone and playability was improved. It includes sound files too to give you some idea of the tone.  I will show what is good, and what is not so good about them. There is a lot of work still to do.

* Meaning a short neck (about 10 mm short of standard) that I’ve had to lengthen.

About this site

I first created this site, www.platetuning.org in November 2007. I had no idea how many people would visit it.

Now for August 2008 it’s interesting to reflect on who visits the site, and where visitors come from.

  As far as ‘popularity’ goes most visitors (see left) not surprisingly are in the US of A, but next comes South Korea - and that is surprising. Then comes the UK, then France, China, Finland and Spain.

Google translation does make this (and any other site) readable in pretty much any language.

The statistics below show how many people visit the site and how many pages and files they download. The site gets 20 to 30 visits a day, and most people stay about 5 minutes: some only a few moments, and some for an hour?!

I guess that’s pretty surprising in retrospect for such a specialist subject.

  What has surprised me is how few people contact me or visit the blog. I’m disappointed, as I’d hoped that I’d learn more of other people’s experiences as they tell their stories of violins thev’ve known, made or modified, but I have had a few great contacts over the last 10 months.

So mail me! Tell me whet you’re doing in breaking open a violin!