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 as an amateur for some 51 years now, and rebuilding basket-case violins and violas for 10 years or more. Over the last 3 or 4 years the odd violin or two for rebuilding has become the 40 or more - as I discovered eBay. Not one single violin among them was a Stradivarius: the labels were 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. I retired at the beginning of this year, 2009.

  Here’s a picture of me disguised as Pantomime Dame left, attempting to eat a member of the audience. He shouted “It’s behind you” when he should have shouted “Oh no it isn’t”.   Above is me 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.

  I recently bought a very good, and very expensive Richard Weichold violin bow off Dave Swarbrick (Swarb) as a retirement present to myself. Here’s a picture of the Swarb himself with said bow. I’m hoping that some of his ability will pass to me by osmosis from the bow: it’s working a little, as I can now play nearly half of the Bach Partita No. 3 ....... so there’s only another 10,000 hours of practice to go.

 I couldn’t resist putting a picture of me with Swarb: ability by inference rather than evidence.

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

Of the 35+ low-cost violins (and violas) I have, so far I’ve modified 16. These are of all sorts, and links to some of those in detail with pictures and Stiffness Factors can be found on the “Violin viola examples” page.

The changes I have made to these fiddles verify that Dr. Harris’s ‘formula’ really works, and my minor additions to it improve the results when the plates (the wood) is particularly non-standard, which usually means particularly dense or heavy. The method can be applied to 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.

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 in December 2009 it’s interesting to reflect on who visits the site, and where visitors come from. As far as ‘popularity’ goes, 30%, not surprisingly are from the US of A. Then comes 11% from the UK, then 9% from Italy, and 5% now from China: click on the picture left.

Google translation does make this (and any other site) readable in pretty much any language. The greek translation is popular, then the Italian (obviously from Cremona), and then French.

The statistics below show how many people visit the site and how many pages and files they download. The site gets an average of 42 visits a day, and most people stay 2 to 5 minutes and look at 2 pages. Some stay for an hour!

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

One ‘popular’ page is the “Books links and Articles” page: hardly surprising I suppose.

  What has surprised me is how few people contact me or visit the blog. 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! and tell me what you’re doing breaking open a violin!