Fender Needs a Premium Electric Violin

The FV1, an old thing which they still sell I believe, looks terrible. The FV3 is a gorgeous Violin, apparently made in a Chinese Furniture Factory which accounts for why it looks so much like a lacquer coffee table, but apparently the design calls for the bridge crushing down on top of the piezoelectric-pickup that lays under it in the bridge well. My FV3 had to go in for repair after less than a month. And the wood of the head and the pegs are incompatible – the hard wood of the head squeezes down and polishes the pegs smooth so that they begin to slip. Every few weeks one has to unstring the violin and sand paper the pegs so that they will grip again. I suppose one would have to experiment with light glues or bee honey, or whatever would keep the peg tuners from slipping.

And the tone of the FV3, while superior to most entry level electric violins, doesn’t come close to the pretty sound that such violins as the NS Design CR4 can make. Oh, don’t confuse the CR4 premium series with the NS Design WAV Series, which don’t sound any better themselves than the FV3, but at least they stay in tune and their pickups don’t drop dead or die out.

Anyway, the FV3 has now been around for years. I suppose it once made sense for Fender to test the Electric Violin Market, but what sense does it make to test that Market with a noticeably inferior product? … Well, inferior when compared to the Quality and Value end of the market, when price point goes much above the ‘entry level’ level.

And we are talking about Fender!? Why is Fender, of all companies, splashing around at the shallow end of the Pool, so to speak?

Fender, while not being the priciest vendor in the Guitar Market, they have always been known for a certain basic quality… and the FV3, if it wasn’t before, in a less developed Market, it is now not up to those same quality standards that we would expect of them. Such a product line, left unimproved, could only hurt them.

And who is their competition? NS Design is selling their CR4 and CR5 Series Violins and Violas at $2000+. Well, Fender is able to put out almost their finest quality guitars and basses for that price… signature editions going for only a little a bit more. We’re talking about extremely high quality product! So certainly, violins and violas are well within their engineering parameters for producing a BETTER violin than NS Design, and which they could sell for $1800, cutting the market out from under NS Design (or forcing NS Design to a more realistic price points for their relatively simple ‘blocks of wood’).

What would a New Fender Electric Violin look like? Well, it would look like a Fender. Forget the traditional Violin Head with its slipping Pegs. Use a Fender Style Head, with all the geared metal guitar style tuners on the same side and with that distinctive tilt. They could use the tuners from any Telecaster Guitar… I measured… they would work just fine. It is difficult to beat the NS Design string setup and tuners… strings on an NS Design can be whipped in and out in mere seconds, and tuning stays rock solid for just about forever… as long as one is using stable steel and chrome steel strings. But tuning holes and guitar style tuners are easy enough to deal with, and everybody is already used to them. The NS Design string setup might be inherently better, but not $500 better. And the guitar style tuners have a ‘look’… a penache… where the NS Design strings system, is, well, invisible.

Now, violin shape. Remember that traditional violins have a particular shape in order to develop a pleasing audible tone. But whatever the shape of the violin, in whatever ways it sticks out on the sides, it gets in the way of the bow… that is why they dig those indents into the sides of the traditional violins, so that the bow can come down to the sides unobstructed. But the traditional violin only offered a few inches of freedom, when really, in a perfectly free Electronic World, the violin should remain narrow all the way up its neck, so that the bow can be used, well, anywhere up and down the neck. But that would basically be a head with tuners on a neck that would go down to the bridge… basically a stick with strings. It would be fairly ugly, just as many of the better electric violins today are monstrously ugly. Again the NS Design has hit a fairly good compromise between bow friendly narrowness of body and aesthetic good looks… using some old European lute shape to give the violin some hint of character and a moderately pleasing line. Fender could try the about same thing, fleshing out a narrow body, but with a more contemporary line, using round and rolling lines where NS Design used primarily straight lines and flat edges.

Next we get to the Chin Rest and Shoulder Rest problems, and this is where Tradition haunts us with so much that is simply inconvenient nowadays. Traditionally one held a violin steady by clamping it down with ones chin against one’s shoulder. Chin rests were invented to conform comfortably to the chin, and shoulder rests were invented to conform comfortably to the shoulder. And it all works well with feather-light traditional acoustical violins… they don’t weigh anything and they are therefore easy to support in this bazaar but traditional manner. But Electric Violins are heavier, which makes the old chin and shoulder rest solutions problematic but which suggest newer and better means of stabilizing the violin for playing. Why not just collar the violin closely around the neck and play it a bit more in front instead of exactly over the shoulder, which I always felt to be uncomfortable anyway.

I played the FV3 without its stupid shoulder rest (designed to fall off anytime it was not planted firmly on a shoulder) using a choker collar tied to the tailpiece strap to keep it close to my throat and never needed to bring my chin down on the chin rest.

The NS Design has its Shoulder Rest, with its awkward bend made to go over the shoulder, but if one swings it down to be used to support the violin on one’s chest, then the shoulder curve has a bit of an unpleasant stab behind it. But as a general principle, a violin supported by a neck choker would benefit by some under-support on the chest to keep it at a flat angle or at whatever a player’s preferred angle happens to be. The FV3 was broad enough in its base so that it held itself flat almost automatically and so no under-support was really needed. So maybe if the violin is designed to have something of a broad base, no under-support is necessary at all. Also, a broad base would add to stability weight, but since the center of gravity is so close to the point of support on the choke collar around the neck, any extra weight would not be noticed by the left hand which could remain busy with the business of playing the strings and not having to hold the violin in proper position.

I’d like to be able to simply do away with Chin Rests. While the Shoulder Rest of the NS Designs can be useful, the Chin Rest simply gets in the way and starts stabbing me in the neck and throat. I had to use the Chin Rest just to keep it in one safe place where it wasn’t always trying to kill me. I finally ended up wrapping it in some ugly foam padding so I could go back to ignoring it altogether.

I thought of the Violin Choke Collar and therefore I have it patent pending, but I am so found of Fender Company, having a few of their guitar and bass models, that I would sell them license rights to the Violin Choker for a virtual song. Oh, another advantage of the Violin Choker, is that when the violin is not being played, one can simply let it drop down on one’s chest. Violins and even Violas are relatively small, and one can go about one’s business with hands free. The NS Design is a but more cumbersome, with its large shoulder rest contraption, but even all of that is not much when it is lying flat on one’s chest. I do sound studio work, and even go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, all with a violin hanging around my neck. While performing, one can break off from playing and sing a verse or two into a microphone, hands free (well, except for the bow), but immediately begin playing violin again, because one never really put the violin down.

Oh, and there is a more basic thing about Electric Violins. Everybody is using Piezoelectric Pickups or little microphones as the heart and soul of the Electric Violin electronics. Ostensively they don’t use the same kind of coil pickups that electric guitars use because some violinists still want to use ancient style cat gut or the more modern synthetic strings wrapped in aluminum, neither of which have enough feral magnetic content that they would be ‘picked up’ by a coil pickup. But nowadays most Electric Violin Players use steel strings, because of their superior tune stability and durability. And durability is no small thing. The Aluminum Windings on synthetic core strings is delicate, brittle… I heard it compared to butterfly wings in regards to its fragility. I’ve had sets of strings that did not last a week of even mellow Rock and Roll practice. Barry Manilow is too rough for an aluminum wrapped core string! Also, aluminum, even with flat windings, is NOT smooth… the molecular structure of aluminum is coarse and grabby and prevents a good finger slide, even when oiled! Whereas steel strings and chrome steel wound strings are slippery smooth and durable.

So, if steel strings are so good for electric violins, why aren’t we using coil pickups for violin. Remember, with a narrow body design, the bowing can be accomplished either over the pickups after the fingerboard runs out, or the bowing can be done over the fingerboard itself. There can be two sets of pickups… just like on the guitars – a neck pickup and a bridge pickup.

Oh, and sooner or later somebody has to figure out how to make an affordable laser pickup for strings. If they can shine a laser on a window pane of glass and use it as a spy microphone, then certainly laser reflections off a string a fraction of an inch away can be detected for audio tones. But electronic coils might be the least expensive way to go for still some time, although with technology getting cheaper and cheaper, soon it might be less expensive to produce a cheap little LED laser pickup and it logic chip than to wind an expensive magnet with expensive copper wires.

Anyway, I suppose we are all looking forward to seeing a good Fender Electric Violin in the foreseeable future… even fans of the NS Design Violins and the other brands out there who have their price point up above $2000.