There is a body modification that is easy to do,
cheap to do, and will improve the feel and performance envelope of whatever NS
Design Violin or Viola that you may happen to own. I presently own a CR4 Viola, but had had a
WAV4. You can read the Leo Volont
reviews at Amazon.
I’ve been very happy with the CR4 Viola. Yes,
maybe I should have simply gotten a CR5 Violin which would have given me the same
low end of a Viola, theoretically anyway, while still allowing me the high
range of a Violin’s E string. The one
problem there, though, was that I tried converting a Violin to a short scale
Viola, using the fattest four strings from a set of strings for the NS Design
CR5 – a fat C, then the usual G, D, A, E
– and I would simply set aside the E string.
Well, the C string would seem too long for the job, as I couldn’t tune it
down to C without it sounding loose and flabby.
Maybe it would have worked on an actual CR5, as the specifications say
it is a 13 inch scale, that is, about a half inch longer than the violin I had actually
been experimenting with, and that may have made enough of a difference for the setup
to be workable. Violin strings have
remarkably little ‘wiggle room’ that is, compared to guitars which can be tuned
up or down several steps without severe implications. However, what I do know for sure is that steel
viola strings, from all of the various vendors, work and sound marvelous on the
CR4 Viola – no flabby C string there. The CR5 would still be a big Question
Mark for me.
Anyway, back to the main topic – the Modification. So what was my problem that I had to do a
Modification? Well, let me
explain. I would be doing a long
practice, and getting better and quicker, and as I play by ear along with CD’s
or canned music, well, my mind, that is, my Left Side Brain, would wander, allowing
the Right Side brain to do all the ‘heavy lifting’ with no real conscious attention
being paid, and then sometimes, suddenly, my left hand would be completely thrown
off the neck of the viola, and the viola would come pounding down onto my
chest. It would have been on the floor,
if I hadn’t tied the viola around my neck.
Oh, let me explain.
There is a bit of a universal problem with Electric Violins in general
and especially with the NS Design Violins in particular, which is essentially a
big block of wood, and that is that they are much heavier than traditional Violins,
and so there is the complaint that a great deal of effort is required from the
Left Hand to simply hold the violin up and keep it in place, and that this
detracts from the Left Hand’s ability and freedom to simply do the
playing. My solution for this problem
was to run a short rope, with clips attached to both ends, through the Shoulder
Rest Post and collar it around my neck.
Because most of the weight of a NS Design is in the lower body, well, therefore,
the support choke collar holds up most of the weight, and it frees up the left
hand so that it only has to be concerned with the fingering. But what exactly was causing my left hand to
break loose?
I was puzzled, and so I began to insist that my Left
Brain not wander off too far during Practice and that it must put some minimal
energy into laying wait for another such instance of dropping the instrument so
I could see by what mechanism my hand was being torn away from my NS Design
Viola. Anyway, I finally caught the
cause – I would be playing on the upper to mid-neck when suddenly I would feel
it necessary to punch a note most easily accessible if I shot down all the way to
the bottom of the neck and hit the Fat C string just where the finger board
runs out and off into space ahead of the bridge. Turning the NS Design violins or violas up-side-down
reveals that about 3 or 4 inches before the neck completely flares out into the
full body of the instrument, there is a kind of neck to body buttress. Do take note that the NS Design is basically
a single block of wood with an ebony finger board attached, so that the neck
and body are one piece and continuous.
Well, on a real violin, the neck in its last inch or so, flares out so
that it can buttress into the full width of the body. The NS Design imitates this flare, but does
it a good three or four inches before the relatively narrow body of the NS
Design actually takes shape. Of course I
took off that little ‘Wing Ding Thing’—that piece that is supposed to inform
the traditional violin player of where a real violin’s body would begin, so
that he could scale and reference himself for all those ‘positions’ that a real
violin player must pay attention to, since he has no frets to ‘fret’ about and count up and down as do real guitar players.
But I had left the screw in the hole so
that I would not lose it, and since that screw and washer rise up by about 3/8
of an inch, well, that may have been part of the problem too… so I took it out.
Anyway, in quickly bringing my hand down the
neck and reaching over the top of the fingerboard, I had come down into the
widening neck buttress and it was prying my hand off the neck. Now, that neck buttress extension, as I have
said, is about 3 or 4 inches long, and the corners to the front and bottom sides
are sharp right corner edges. Yes, ouch!
Well, since I sometimes have a scotch or two during
practice, and since a scotch or two tends to free up the mind for so many more
possibilities then a sober mind would ever dare to contemplate, well, I
instantly knew what I had to do with my twenty-five hundred dollar precision
musical instrument to fix its problem – grab a file and rasp off that front
buttress edge and those sharp side edges.
And it worked!
Well, it wasn’t quite all that simple. I have a fairly nice bunch of tools laying
around, and plenty of sand paper for various jobs, and so the job wasn’t all
that haphazard, and it even turned out looking pretty nice. I do not know precisely how long it took, as
I did the job incrementally – the first night I cut into the corners by about a
quarter of an inch, and that took about 40 minute of rough filing and then
progressively sanding and shaping with first 80 grain sandpaper, then 120, then
180 then 220 then 400 then 600. After
the first night it felt so good that I was encouraged, but since I still felt
the remnants of ‘edges’ I decided to cut a bit deeper, and take the wood down
about a half inch from where the edges had been, taking the cuts up to the edge
of the Screw Insert used for the Wing Ding Body Reference Thing. And that took another 40 minutes. But if you were to do the entire job at once,
without having to do all of the sandpapering twice, well, I suppose it would
only take you about an hour to do the whole job.
Now the NS Design CR feels totally different – like I
had gone out and bought a whole new instrument.
Now I can bring my hand comfortably all the way down to the very bottom of
the fingerboard, where I used to have to strain and stretch. Now it is all utterly comfortable. And it has such a wonderful ‘feel’.
Oh, about files and rasps. If the rasps are too coarse, then it will be
difficult to dig into the CR’s relatively hard wood, and when you begin
stroking, the strokes will be jumpy and irregular. But if
the rasps are too fine, then the job will take longer than necessary. So if you have to go out and buy a file, then
buy a cheap multi-use file, if you can find one, that has two or four different
rasp resolutions, and you can decide on the best one as you do the job. About sandpaper – you can do a lot of digging
and shaping with coarse sandpaper, that is, about 80 grit, so don’t think you have to take the
job all the way down with the file rasp.
When you have the shape well established, then go up the grades of
sandpaper gradually, as stated above, so that you can take out the scratches
gradually as you go. Now, I took the job
up to 400 and then 600 grit, which is very very fine. Was that entirely necessary? Well, I have seen people do work on their
guitars finishing at 220 grit, and the jobs looked good and felt smooth. But you can feel the difference if you continue
on to 400. 600 is like a glass polish,
and you won’t really get wood dust anymore, but it will bring out a grain-less shine,
and the smoothness will be angelic, that is, only an angel will be able to tell
the difference between a 400 grit and a 600 grit finish… but you will know
because you did it… and, besides, it never hurts to toss the Angels a bone once
in a while, so to speak. Oh, an old Wood Shop Tip – after you begin
your fine sandpapering, take a wet rag and moisten the surface of the wood, as
that will raise the grain a bit and allow you to take the smoothness down to the very root of the wood.
Oh, here is some advice if you also work and drink
at the same time as I do (I should mention that Music Practice has its rules, the
ones that concern us here are that, for adults, the reward for conscientious Practice
is a neat shot of scotch every hour on the hour (and no shortcutting the clock!),
and then there is the rule that Instrument Maintenance counts as Practice
too. One should never feel that Instrument
Maintenance, or Electronics Setup or whatever is an ‘interruption’ of Music
Practice – it IS Music Practice – as much as struggling with a scaled progressive
slide-up bridge transition to a change in Key.
Anyway, probably even if you are as sober as the bitterest old nag you
can think of, you should take the precaution of taping up what you don’t want
to accidently mar or scratch. I took
simple packaging tape and circled the neck and the upper body, and remembered
to fold the last end of the tape over on itself so that un-taping when the job
was over would not be a problem of finger-nailing
up the invisible edges that you can no longer find.
Really, the Job was fairly non-intrusive – after I
finished, the NS Design CR was still in tune.
Of course, the NS Designs are famous for staying in tune, but I still
was surprised that after all of that scraping and flopping around on the
kitchen table, with all the cats getting in the way, that the strings and
bridge had not been disturbed enough to change any of the strings even by a mere
fraction of a note.
Yes, for an hours work, and the price of tools and
stuff that wouldn’t amount to any more than you’d pay for another set of
strings, you can get a so much more aesthetic ‘feel’ to your NS Design, and
increase the ease of playing, or if you have small hands, actually increase the
absolute range of your playing envelope.
Yes, the NS Designs does come great right out of the
box, but, yes, you can make them even better.
