1860 Vermont-made 4/4 Violin

Update 2017: Since originally posting this in 2012, not much has changed with the instrument, but I did shoot new photos and have updated the description with current information and a soundclip. It's still wearing old strings in the above clip (and the A is beginning to sound a bit weak), so please be gentle on me. This comes with a decent "flight" case and a new, carbon fiber student bow.

This fiddle has a yarn as old as it seems to be. On the inside back, there's a burned-in stamp of 1860. Considering the beautifully-light, carefully-graduated build (voiced for gut tension) and the choice woods (check out how tight the grain in the top is), I have no doubt it was made in 1860. The other part of the story is that it was Vermont-made -- which is something I cannot guarantee except that the guy who refinished it (a violin maker and repairman working through the '60s-'90s) told the owner I got it from that it had that provenance. Said owner has forgotten the rest of the details.

All that said, it's a well-built instrument and has survived many years of duty. There's an old neck-block/side repair that you can see in pictures a bit later in the post and, of course, it's been refinished -- but otherwise it's dealt with time pretty well. When I got it some seams were sprung and I glued them back together. The old refinish job was also not 100% beautiful, so I got out all of my microgrit papers and proceeded to buff it up to an even, thin, and lustrous French-polish-looking satin that suits the instrument.

My other work in the past included yanking some obnoxious Caspari pegs out of the headstock and installing banjo-style friction pegs (sorry, purists, but it worked well for outdoor shows -- no slipping), stringing with a set of John Pearse Mezzo (Thomastik Dominants, basically) strings, and a good setup. It has a gorgeous, full-spectrum lower-mids tone that's full and sounds ginormous on double-stops. Playing with different strings will gain you a lot of mileage but the cut of the instrument is light enough that I would not suggest steel-core strings on the GDA portion of any sort. That'd just give it a "driven" sound, anyway.

I've had various synthetic-core strings on here and the more modern-flavored ones do bring out the D and A strings a lot more than these Dominant-style Pearse strings which tend to be pretty relaxed. 

After doing the initial work on this, I played this fiddle pretty hard for a year and then traded it to a customer/acquaintance of mine out Washington-way. I'd decided at the time not to go whole-heartedly into bowed territory as I knew I only had X amount of time to go around. It's since come back this year (2017) as the last owner stopped fiddling as well.

Everything is nicely-cut on this instrument. The scroll is elegant and so's the pegbox.

The ebony fingerboard is made from good stock, too, and both the top and back edges have purfling.

While the tail is older, the chinrest is newer.

The one-piece, highly-figured-maple back is just jaw-droppingly pretty.

I've since re-spaced the strings and cleaned-up the top edge of that bridge.

See the tiny repaired crack next to the heel? That and the dot on the rear of the heel suggest an old neck reset/repair. It's still going strong and the only obvious sign of its need is the tiny patch of missing top material beyond the purfling and bumped-up against the heel.