My violin buying experience Part I

(left to right) the engraved, the “OG”, the “Storioni”, the “lumberjack”

At the beginning of the Pandemic after the initial shock set in, those of us who were lucky enough to be able to work from home started to adjust to the new routine. We decorated our home office, bought new lounge wear and home gym equipments, made our own sourdough bread… I of course had my own Covid project - learning to play the violin.

I have loved the violin all my life. It’s elegant, versatile, notoriously difficult, and most importantly, it embodies a ‘cantabile’ quality that is deeply moving. I decided that there would never be such a good opportunity to learn it. The day before the labor day weekend in 2020, I drove to a local musical instrument store and left with my very first rental violin. I practically squealed and skipped across the parking lot to my car afterwards. I could not wait to go home and get started.

The first few months were a couple of trials and many, many errors. One of the first things I learnt about the violin was that you couldn’t learn it as a complete beginning from Youtube tutorials. In hindsight I would have saved myself a lot of time and frustration if I had found a teacher at the very beginning. But that was nearly impossible during the first year of the Pandemic. Thankfully I found my teacher in September 2021 before I could do too much damage. At this point I was playing on an upgraded rental violin and bow. At the end of 2021 I was certain that violin wasn’t going to be another one of my short term obsessions. The idea of purchasing my first violin began to form in my mind. I decided to start looking in spring of 2022.

Why did it take me so long to decide to buy a violin? I will have you know that it has nothing to do with my commitment issues. (How dare you!) Violins are expensive, the nice-sounding ones, not the cardboard ones strung with shoe laces from Amazon for $60… A decent high-school student violin costs around two to three thousand, plus bow. A college / pre-professional level violin costs above five thousand, and as for professional ones, the sky is the limit. The budget I set for my first outfit is five thousand for the violin and another one thousand for the bow. While this level of instrument can carry me through the next 7 - 10 years, it is still a big investment up front. I wanted to be sure to find ‘the one’.

My first appointment (of many, as it turned out) was in June at the store I’ve been renting my violin from. I went with my teacher and a violinist friend. After trying and ranking about a dozen violins, I went home with two to try - one bright with engravings in the back and the other mellow but turned out to sound like it’s got a head cold. After about a week of trial, I wasn’t satisfied with either instrument. So my search continued.

The two major challenges I have picking out a violin are one, my taste and preference in violin are still developing. It was difficult to articulate what sound quality I was looking for. My own preference was sometimes inconsistent as well. Sometimes I preferred a sweet, airy sound and sometimes I prefer a dark, full-bodied sound. Another issue is that how a violin sounds depends largely on the player. Being a beginner myself, it was difficult to make any violin sound good, regardless of their quality. I needed to learn to listen for the potential of the instrument, and not just how it sounded in my hand at the moment.

My second appointment was at a strings store with just my friend. The shop kindly laid out 8 instruments in my price range and some bow choices as well. We repeated the process of trying and ranking and decided on a yellow number which we affectionately called “the OG”. I had a hard time overlooking the color of the varnish but the violin sounded quite rich and lovely. The provenance was unknown but likely to be German circa 1920.

My third appointment was on the same day at higher end strings store. I wasn’t so impressed with the selection but found one violin with a very interesting back story. A woman came to the shop with a vintage violin she claimed to be a Storioni, which if was authentic, could easily be worth over half a million. This violin belonged to the lady’s mother who recently passed away. She played on it the better part of her life. The store sent it to an expert in Boston to authenticate and the results was shocking. It turned out to be a much newer German instrument circa 1900, instead of the fine Italian Storioni from late 1700s. It was valued at $6000. I was intrigued by the story and decided to give it a try, along with another German/Czech number from the turn of the century.

Now I had four violins on trial for about 2 weeks. Trying them out one by one in the comfort of my own home was the most fun I’d had in a long while. Unfortunately nothing clicked for various reasons. The one was the engraving has a very bright E string; The D string on the OG does not project well; the fake Storioni sounded closed-off and a bit nasally; the German/Czech one sounded like a gruff lumberjack that was rough on the edges. After two weeks I was frustrated and disappointed. When I set out on my violin buying journey, I thought it was going to be a fairy-tale romance but it ended up like dating in the modern age… I wasn’t satisfied and I was not going to settle for something I don’t love and hope that it would grow on me.

In the end I returned all of them. My search continued…