Books › The violin : how to choose one, 1893 › scan 37
Scan 37
The violin : how to choose one, 1893
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 33. See the scan on archive.org.
1the bow brings out one; a strong pressure the other. This form may sometimes be cured or modified by a slight alteration in the position of the sound-post from its usual place. The wolf note in its worst form is a jarring and throbbing as of two notes a quarter of a tone distant fighting each other like fiends. This defect must not be confounded with a certain stage which nearly every new violin has to pass through, which I may name
3THE DISTEMPER,
5and in which the whole instrument seems to have gone wrong, or got loose and rattly. When a new violin is first strung it sounds well; but when the owner settles down to practice hard upon it, it very often changes suddenly, and sounds so bad that he fancies the bass bar has got loose. The cure for that is persistent hard playing, when it slowly rights itself, and never again takes the same trouble. That, however, is not a wolf note, which is caused by some disagreement in the proportions of the back and breast of the violin, or by unequal gauging of the thicknesses, or by a defect in the wood, such as a knot, which may be invisible from both sides. When the wolf note arises from the thicknesses being unequal, there is no cure but patching with thin slips of wood to make up the required thickness. If the cause be a knot in the wood, the defective part must be cut out and a better piece inserted. Sometimes, but rarely, a change in the line of the bass bar effects a cure—that is, putting it at a line rather more acute than that of the 4th string.
7Worm-Eaten Violins.
9Sometimes the old violin is worm-eaten—in which case shun it as you would a pestilence. Do not take it as a gift, or put it near other violins; let it go to the collector or the fire or the dust bin. As a rule, it will be no loss, having been made originally of wood cut at the wrong season of the year, or the wrong side of the tree. There is no cure for worm, as you can never be certain of reaching the pest, even by injecting acid at the mouth of the hole, for the worm might be comfortably eating away at the other end of the instru-
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