Every violin story starts out relatively the same. There is either the scenario when a family has a passed down violin and wants a child to learn to play it, or one day a child comes home from school just beaming about how they got to look at instruments at school today and they now want to learn violin. There are so many variants to these scenarios, but this isn’t the point of this article. If you aren’t already in the possesion of a violin, and your child comes home with big sudden plans of learning to play, you have a decision to make. Where do you find a violin?
Since the late 1990s, shopping online started gaining in popularity. It wasn’t until the last decade or so that buying from Amazon became the go-to for many of us to find things that weren’t readily available in stores. Sometimes we would just order on it because it was more convienient to have something delivered than go out and get it, and we didn’t mind the wait. Now when we need to find something we are insterested in, we usually go straight to Amazon to see if they have it (and with 2 day shipping!). You can compare deals, read reviews, get item specs…
It’s great – but not for violins.
Unless you know instruments, you wouldn’t know what to look for in an online purchase (and if you did know instruments, you would know not to bother looking at Amazon, haha). If you searched violin on Amazon, your search results may look a lot like this…
These prices look good right? Considering my main violin is around $8k and the famous Ray Chen’s Stradivarious is around 10 million, a $100-or-less violin sounds like a steal. It’s not. And OH MY GOSH, is that a pink violin?? And I guarantee you that “Solidwood” is a fancy way to say “Solid Plywood”. The quality of these instruments is on average terrible, their longevity is not much better. I know that it looks daunting when researching violins. Don’t worry, you won’t need to spend anywhere near $1000. Your best bet? – RENT.
….Especially if your child is not full grown yet…
Kids grow through violin sizes like they do shoes. Think about those violins in the picture above and multiply that cost by 2, 3, or 4. Renting a violin means you can trade it in at any time and get the next size up for no extra cost except – just keep paying each month’s rent. Plus, the quality of the rental violin from decent reputable music shops is far and above the Amazon-esque violin by miles. I have taught so many kids that have recieved these violins as gifts or parents bought them before they contacted me, and almost all the students complain about their sound and get discouraged. These violins sound terrible. Let me explain a little bit about what makes a violin sound the way it does.
The first thing that affects the sound is the type and quality of wood. Plywood is meant for sub flooring, not fine instruments. The sound of it is thick, dull, muddy, and dead. Correctly made violins have a maple bottom and a spruce top. I think good violin makers probably hate the idea of plywood so much that they develop an alergy to it (don’t quote me on that though, 😉). Sometimes, it is hard to tell by looks alone if a violin is made out of solid grain wood or plywood without opening the instrument up because some cheap violins hide the fact they are cheap by using wood veneers of what you would see in a decent to good quality instrument. These veneers only make it look better quality; the sound will still be the same cheap sound.
The quality of wood, shape, and size of the bridge makes a huge difference as well. The bridge is included in a group of violin components called the “set up.” The set up includes the bridge, fingerboard, sound post, strings, and tail peice. All these need to be optimized to eachother and the violin to create a playable instrumet. The bridges that come with Amazon violins are all misshapen and way too thick. Many don’t even have grooves in them to cradle the strings, and they aren’t fitted to rest on the flat on the violin. I have found the bridges even come glued on the bodies of some of the cheap violins. This will ruin the instrument from the start.
The finger board needs a specific curvature and length. It also needs a slight concaved dip in its plane to create space for the stings to rest at a comfortable distance above the fingerboard. Too low and the strings will buzz or not even make a sound; too high and the player’s fingers and hand will tire quickly and possibly develop bad habits or even injury.
The tailpiece should be a specific length and only extend to a specific distance up from the bottom of the violin. It should not be too lax and touch the violin or else it will create divots and worse in the the wood of the body.
The sound post should be a length and compostition that is fitted uniquely to the body of its particular violin. It also needs to be specifically placed to optimize the sound. Each violin, or any quality, has its own unique qualities to work with, and a sound post that is miss alligned will make a violin sound too tinny, weak in the low notes, weak in the high notes, too quiet, or muffled.
Another thing that is so frustrating about these violins is the bow. On a tightend bow (you loosen it when you store it when not in use), the stick part of the bow should always have a little bit of a downward curve in it. Bows are crafted with this curve in them, and when the bow is tightened the curve is flattened out a bit. This is normal. What is not normal is needing to tighten the bow so much that the curve dissapears, putting the bow at great risk of breaking in two. The bows with the Amazon violins are so poorly made that the “hair” is too long or stretchy for the stick and requires a student to over tighten the bow just to get the right amount of tension in the hair.
If anything goes wrong with an Amazon violin, there is no “tech support, Geek Squad” type of service to help you. Renting through a music store provides you a place to go to if something goes wrong.
If you have a music store near you, visit there and ask about violins. They can answer all your questions about what goes into renting a violin from them (the logistics will vary a bit from store to store). They will let you test out some violins so you can hear what they sound like. Many stores have a rent-to-own plan they offer. Many stores have nice quality instruments sutable for a student all the way through high school.
So the takeaway is rent, rent, RENT if at all possible. It is a much wiser use of your hard earned money. I know that every family’s budget is different and renting a decent student grade instrument mght be too much, and that is completely understandable. My main issue is when a family that has the option to rent but thinks they are getting a steal by being “thrifty” gets a cheap violin and expects it to be fine for their child. I have lost count of how many times I pass my nice violin to my frustrated student to show them that much of their “lack of progress” is tied to the violin and not them. Once they try playing on my violin, they see that a lot of their frustration is missplaced on them selves. I do not like handing my instrument over to a beginner (it is near $10k), but if it keeps a student going forward with the violin and keeps their hope alive I still tend to let them try mine out for a minute or two.
If there is no other option and your student really wants to learn violin, the Amazon violins will work, and any teacher will be excited to teach them to learn. But if you have a choice…
RENT! And please do not blame a teacher for wanting a better instrument for their students. Do not blame the lack of quality sound and the lack of interest on the teacher’s ability to teach or maintain the interest level of our student using a cheap instument. We try the best we can, but just like a wonky computer keyboard would frustrate a student learning to type, or misshapened and miss-aligned hurtles would hamper a hurdler, or a scratced and foggy camera lense would hold back a photographer – a cheap violin will hold back a violin learner. Ask your private teacher or orchestra teacher for a recomendation of where to find the best places to rent an instrument.
Here are some videos about what an Amazon violin is made of as well as the difference in its sound versus other student grade violins. And in this article you can read about a violin maker’s detailed explanation of why the sound is affected by the craftmaship and materials used in making a violin.