Mysterious Bows Newsletter

A series of articles about bows and violins

Violin Setup Notes: Is your tailpiece right?

Besides studying bowmaking, I have studied quite a bit about violin setup issues: bridge making, string selection, peg fitting and sound post placement. My findings were that a good bridge improved the sound of a violin significantly. But what about the tailpiece?

In the Sept 2004 issue of Strad magazine (www.thestrad.com) research from the Oberlin College Acoustics workshop was published concerning tailpieces.

Summary: Professional Luthiers have known that the vibrating string length in front of the bridge (from the bridge to the nut where the string first makes contact) and the vibrating string length behind the bridge should be in a ratio of 6:1.

Practically suppose the string length in front of the bridge is 13”. That is equivalent to 330 mm, therefore 1/6 is 55 mm which should be the length of the string behind the bridge (from the bridge to the point of contact on the tailpiece).

When this optimal position occurs, the strings behind the tailpiece are tuned sympathetically to the strings in front, a fifth above the note but two octaves higher. The note behind the G will be a D two octaves higher.

After having adjusted about 15 violins to optimal, my experiments proved that the sound improvement of the instrument was amazing and the optimal position was quite sensitive even to 2 mm differences. This is because the sympathetic tuning adds to the harmonic structure of the notes, enriching them and adding clarity and focus. When the tailpiece is incorrectly positioned the discordant notes behind the bridge cancel out some of the harmonic frequencies, dulling and muddying notes, particularly the G and the D.

A dysfunctional tailpiece is one either in wood or metal with four steel fine tuners added. This configuration is called the choke, because the string lengths behind the bridge are too short by about 40 mm which mutes and dulls the sound of the instrument.

A functional tailpiece is one that usually has built in integrated tuners. The acoustics research indicated that sound qualities of functional tailpieces were:

• Composite and metal ($25-$40) created a bright sound.
• Ebony - ($70) - a focused ,edgy sound.
• Rosewood- ($70) increased volume
• Boxwood - ($70) a softer tone.

The most important factor for significant sound improvement in the violin was to have a functional tailpiece in the optimal placement position of 1:6 ratio.

If you wish to discuss this in more depth or have a consultation to install an optimal tailpiece contact Greg Dahms.