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And it does not take a pseudo scientific crackpot to tell us get that bel canto and violins came from the same country. It's like, well duh. Ever heard of Monteverde or the Three Women from Ferrara?
Actually the effect of salt on the lignin in wood is actually legitimate, and not quackery, Borax/sodium borate would fall right into the same category.
It's science actually. :)
I'm not saying that a salty fingertip can solve all problems, just that there is some truth to that these substances can, and do change wood
Yes so fast because Italian violins have been tested and they are not salted. Violins are not salted. Bacalao is salted, but some just can't tell the difference between a fish and a violin.
He holds the world record for the most times anyone has discovered the "secret" of Stradivarius violins--a different "secret" each time. The one I liked best was when he "discovered" that Stradivari's varnish was made out of shrimp shells.
My favorite Nagyvary "discovery" was the wood soaked in human urine. The good professor even went so far as to place "contribution buckets" in some of the rest rooms at Texas A&M University, where he taught, with a sign on them reading "Please contribute generously to violin research." Nagyvary has never actually made an instrument himself. "His" violins used to be made by a very talented Chinese maker and then varnished by Nagyvary with whatever his current concoction might have been. One example I saw looked as though it had been varnished with a broom. The shrimp shells stewed in lye to extract the chitin (he also used bug shells) that Richard mentioned is a good one as is his claim that powdered gemstones were part of the formula of the old Italian varnishes. He's been rather quiet for several years (I actually thought that perhaps he finally quit trying to peddle this nonsense) but apparently he's still at it. The guy's a total crackpot.
I think Nagivari got soundly put down by the violin community, those who actually construct instruments and do it professionally just shut him down. And finally there have been a few museum conservators who were able to submit actual Stradivari varnish samples to be analyzed by several different types of microscopy which revealed that the varnishes were made with pine resin. Which every one with two brain cells to rub together already knew. Stewart Pollens, former head of musical instrument conservation at the NYC Met Museum published on this if you want to follow up and read what varnishes are chemically comprised of.
Also the Savart Journal is not a peer reviewed scientific journal. Nagivari has never been anything more than snake oil selling sideshow man in the instrument world. Complete charlatan.
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: chemicaly soaked timbers (in reply to RibNibbler)
quote:
ORIGINAL: RibNibbler
Goat rib, greasy, salty finger brace tuning is scientifically proven and not quackery banana man. Stop spreading (dis)information.
finger licking good. I think spicy chicken wing fingers rubbing braces might improve tone as well. About those ribs, let me know if you need help with that.
All this discussion reminds me of a movie that I saw years ago called "The Red Violin". The color was created by mixing blood of the luthier's wife or girlfriend with varnish. In that way, his loved one could live on forever. (better than BBQ sauce)
maybe the secret to the "conde sound" is lacquer and bbq sauce mixed together--hence the "conde orange" color.
Its not BBQ sauce, blood or urine..... something far more sinister and horrifying... years of study and experience... thats how to make cheap guitars sound like a Conde, or even how to make a Conde sound like a great guitar...
The retired Texas A&M professor has himself made violins that included carefully crafted woods soaked in a variety of chemicals.........
In the mid 80's I was under a 5 year contract with Joseph to build guitars with his top wood treatment. The PhD professor Dr. Philpott was the instigator of this coming together between us and it lasted one year due to the good Dr. not being able to secure the $250,000 grant we were suppose to get for this venture.
I built 4-5 guitars with Joseph's wood treatment and experienced the differences the treatment made for the top's tone. My finding was that guitars and violins are different for the creation of tone and voicing. They are not the same when it comes to washing out the pectin in wood pores, as the guitar needs the pectin to have a ringing sensation, while the violin needs to get rid of it.
But one interesting thing was that the over-all process stiffened the wood and allowed certain sound to escape through the top more easily. However, directing tone in a guitar's top is done more efficiently by the way you place fan bracing with its finely tuned aspects, which follows top graduation technique. All of this is in the hands of the Guitar Maker.
I might add that perhaps Joseph would have done better to have contracted a violin master builder to use his wood treatment instead of Joseph trying to re-tune Chinese copies. But I understand Joseph's thinking to try and keep a better sounding violin at an affordable price, which was $6,000 at that time,
BTW, I have one spruce top left if anyone should choose to pay me $50,000.00 US for a special Miguel Rodriguez style classical guitar with Church Door rosewood :-)
I Remember when I lived in Big Sur CA in the early 1980's there was a summer called the Summer of the Seaweed.
The US Coast Guard was chasing some smugglers up the coast and as the Coast Guard gained on them they threw the cargo over board. It was several bales of marijuana, I don't know how big they were, several kilos each, but there were dozens of them washing up onto the shore of well known surf beach called Fullers Reef.
Fullers was run by a local crew of tough guys, surfers who lived in their VW vans all summer on the Pacific Coast Highway. The wetsuit draped caravan over looked the ocean from 400 ft high cliffs covered with the dusty ecceum plant, sage thickets and lots of blue belly lizards. The boys at Fullers kept non locals at bay, by among other un savory strategies, setting a non local guys car on fire by the side of the road after he got into a beef with one of the local heavies. The guy who's car they torched happened to have been a lawyer who lived up on Monterey. I don't know how that turned out.
Part of the charm of Big Sur is that even though Henry Miller had long passed away, Richard Brautigan no longer lived there had had committed suicide in Bolinas CA, just north of San Francisco, Big Sur Still had a cast of celebrated roadside characters. Brautigan and Miller wrote about them back in the old days, but the new breed was just as interesting as the ones in the novels and short stories.
There was a Kiwi who lived near the trailhead of Fullers Beach in his van, his name was Terry, but most of us called him 'Hide'. He made leather hiking sandals that all the surfers in the area used to traverse the steep goat trails that led from the cliffs to the beach. I had a pair that Hide made for me. You would go find him by the side of the road and ask him for a pair of sandals, he would pull out a piece of cardboard and a sharpie pen and trace your foot ask a few questions and measure your arch. You would give him half of the money in deposit come back in two weeks. His father was a cobbler back in New Zealand and he learned shoe making from his dad and was an excellent craftsman. Hide was also a published author, he wrote mystery novels and it was rumored he had a doctorate degree in something like biology. But this part of the story is not leading anywhere so back to the white punks on dope of Fullers beach.
The day the Seaweed washed up the big boys cleared the beach of all the non essential personnel, meaning the twurps from the city. They set out on surfboards and paddled out half a mile or more scouting the area beyond the kelp beds. The bundles of seaweed were getting stuck in the kelp and they dutifully ridded mother nature of this unwanted sea trash. Surfers really were the first conservationists of the ocean in California.
Once all the seaweed was collected, the surf mafia set about drying it and selling it about town. It became all the rage. I don't smoke, I have asthma, but I was told the salty sea water imparted a raspy after effect giving the smoker a bit of a scratchy throat. But that minor irritation did not deter the robust usage of this seaborne product.
I don't want to moralize and make this into an allegory, or worse yet a pretentious exegesis on the evils of drugs. But I think you know where this is headed, so brace yourself. The Seaweed did not make great violins, but if one smoked enough they all sounded like Stads.
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