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.

Here are more details on some of the instruments I have modified:-

A German Maggini copy,

A good modern Chinese violin c. 1980,

JTL Medio Fino, Marked “Steiner”.

German “Bench fiddle”, circa 1800 marked ‘Hopf’, with a ‘transitional’ neck, dating from the early 1800’s. I lengthened the neck at its root.

a 15 1/4” (387 mm) Viola, modified to have low plate stiffness factors, and making an outstanding student / orchestral viola!

a German (transitional *) fiddle with a lions-head scroll, also dating from the early 1800’s. It had such low belly Mode 2 that I needed to add 5 cross-braces to raise Mode 2 and also improve the ring/Mode 5 resonances. An outstanding tone - a delight to play.

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, reasonably matched ‘stiffness factors’ (which is the ratio of plate stiffness figure to the Reference plate stiffness, as given on this page) on both front and back.

 * With a short neck, the kind fitted before ~1820.

There is also a page on the violins and violas at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK here. This includes the Stradivari “Messiah” violin.