Ever seen those great looking cheap violins for sale online for $99 and thought “why are all the other violins so expensive”. Of course one play of them is usually enough to know why…but how do they make them for the price ? This one looks like reasonable spruce on the top and lightly flamed maple on the back. These violins are sometimes called VSO’s violin shaped objects
Once the top is off all is revealed, what you have instead is a ply wood violin with light veneers of both on the outside. The plywood here is pressed into shape rather than carved (whoch takes a lot of time to do) and stuck together with what looks like a white PVA style glue. The bar bar looks like a piece of offcut pine with grain lines all over the place and the top and bottom blocks are similar. It’s very hard to get any kind of resonance out of a violin like this cross grain ply is just too stiff.
The piece de resistance though I think is the sound post – its actually fine grained spuce, so to the casual observer looking inside “oh good sound post, nice timbers on the outside…this violin must be OK!
The asking price for a violin like this is less that $100AUD – its probably a fair price for the instrument, but when you consider this is the cost of just a few violin lessons…it’s probably better to spend a bit more! See my new violins here and my preloved secondhand violins as well.