How my workshop violins are graded? (or how I tell which is better than the other?)
Q: We notice that you describe your violins according to some grading system, e.g. some as ‘Advanced Level’, ‘Advanced Level 4/4′, ‘Professional Level’, ‘Rare’, etc. Can you please let us know what are the different grades you use. What are the criteria you use to grade them (e.g. is it by age and quality of wood, sound or tone quality, workmanship, etc). MANY THANKS. Woodglue.
Nov 17, 2006
A: Hi Woodglue, the age of the violin is stated. Each batch of wood is at least 10 years of age. Some are older, but older alone does not mean better sound in many cases. We play each violin before they are varnished to determine their level according to their sound and flaming pattern. The workmanship for each range is uniform, regardless of their grade – A 2star is made in the same way as a 5star. Composer violins is another range of violins, hence workmanship is uniform across all composer violins. Composer violins is rather uniform in sound, being rich and powerful. Performa range of violins have different grades in terms of tones. This is due to the tuning of the base table during the making process, and the top spruce is made slightly thicker to open up for more development as the violin is played. The Composer is slightly more limited, but it plays easily and the sound opens up much faster than Performa. I have a poster in my Performa violin auction which explains the various star grading. If you have an email I can email this to you. Hope this helps.
A multiple grades/scores system also helps you to price your violins. Right now, buyers are confused to see that two violins, same model and similar look, all are 5 star, different prices. With a multiple grades/scores system, you can easily tell the difference such as both have 5 star sound, one has a 5 star look and the other has a 4 star look and so different prices are justified.
A multiple grades/scores system is also efficient. You have copy/paste SAME comments from experts as descriptions for several violins and users get confused; are these violins same? Every violin is different but it is tedious for you to use words and sentences to describe the differences of each violin. However, it is easy for you to post descriptions such as sound: 5 star, playability: 3 star, aesthetics: 4 star, etc.
I think it would be better if you grade your violins after the varnish is completely done. Varnish is very important, it significantly changes the sound quality of the violin.
Some people want extreme beauty and some people want optimal sound. If you can provide multiple grades/scores for a violin, it will be very helpful for people who want to buy top quality violins from internet yet they can not hear or touch the violin before they buy. Multiple grading can convey more complicated features of a violin than a single 5 star or one piece back. For example, a violin can have 5 star on tone, 4 star on playability and 4 star on aesthetics. I just make it up to explain my ideas. This will be very useful for sophiscated buyers, which seem to be the majority of your customers.