I currently have a stentor student 2, and I didnt used to think it was that bad, but now, it is sounding hidious. I am about grade 4 standard. When I have earnt some more money, I really want a new violin, preferably a nice one which is not mass produced, but still affordable by a student on a part time mc donalds wage! Any ideas?? And i have already had ebay suggested to me, but i would be worried about getting some dodgy old violin in desperate need of cosmetic surgery.

Yes indeed, plenty of ideas, depending how much you want to spend. How much do you want to spend?

Liz

I'm not sure! I'm just browsing your website now. PS, loving the chamber of horrors vile violins haha

A bit overwhelmed by all the different ones! What would you recommend liz for a student?

It really doesn't work that way! Decide how much you want to spend, go to your nearest reputable violin shop and try out about 5 viollins in that price range. Don't worry about what make they are or what country they were made in, just try them out. Take a friend and get the friend to pass them to you one by one with your eyes closed and keep playing them until you decide that one of them sounds a bit better than all the others - warmer tone, stronger sound, feels good to play.

That's the one you buy.

Violinia

Yes, you do need to decide what you are able and willing to spend. I mean, there is little point in anyone suggesting a super buy for £2000 if your ceiling is £400, and similarly there is little point in someone suggesting, say, a Stentor Conservatoire or a Zeller, if you are able to spend £400.

If you have a budget that allows you to buy a violin beyond the outfit price range, then allow enough for a good bow (and get a selection of bows on approval since people's tastes in bows vary MUCH more than taste in violins)

Finally, don't blow much of your budget on a case: by FAR the best place to get cases is online, there are some incredible bargains out there for very nice cases. Some retailers, probably most, will give a substantial discount on a bow and case if you are buying a violin from them so that is worth considering.

Now i am going to disagree with violinia on one thing (and admit that of course i have a vested interest in doing so). Bear in mind the following: 1. Impressive retail premises cost a huge amount to upkeep 2. The importer's margin on a violin is MUCH higher than the retail profit margin. Cut out the middleman and you save a vast amount of money. Avoid retail premises and you save a fair amount of money. Before I get jumped on all over for saying that (those are the indisputable facts) I will point out that specialist shops do work to the violin to add value, and of course a large specialist retail premises does mean you can choose easily. You just won't get as much violin for your money. Small retail premises exist and have far fewer overheads but possibly a narrower choice, however you will probably get more for your money.

Now say you have £200 to spend. You could get a Stentor Conservatoire from a discount warehouse type shop for considerably less than that, but the violin will not have been checked, it will just go straight from their shelf into the post. One or two specialist shops will charge as much for a Stentor Student 1 as the warehouse will charge for a Stentor conservatoire, but they will have done some work to the violin and it will play as well as it possibly can play. The question for you is, will it play as well as an unimproved but basically far better model that has had no extra work done to it.

Now add a further complication and consider the retailers (mainly but not exclusively online) who import their own stock and therefore avoid the wholesaler's mark-up, and you can see that it begins to get complicated! Don't write off ebay, but DO write off any ebay seller who is not a specialist if you are buying a new instrument, and DO wrote off any specialist seller with less than 99.9% postiive feedback (and you MUST count the neutrals too) unless the negatives and neutrals are clearly undeserved or were earned as a buyer rather than as a seller. You have BY LAW the right to return an instrument, unused, within seven days for ANY reason at all, and lose only reasonable postage costs, as long as you are buying from a trader rather than a private individual, and as long as the item is not a special order and is not sold at auction.

Liz

One more thing about ebay: take claims made by some sellers with a pinch of salt (look at the feedback). Right now on ebay there is a seller who is claiming that a Rainbow violin (for which, incidentally, she is using MY pictures, without permission) is suitable for professionals. She is claiming the same thing about a zeller which she claims she bought for £450 (three times the list price). Hmm.

A US seller who sells an awful lot describes some of his violins as professional and having bought one I can tell you they would need quite a lot of set up work to make them playable even at an advanced student level.

Liz

Anybody who buys a violin online without trying it out is asking for trouble. They may get lucky but chances are they won't. It's got to feel right! Do you really want all the trouble of buying one, sending it back and then repeating the process until you find one you like? Sounds mad to me.

OK, you check the reputableness of your local store by asking around; if people have been continually ripped off they'll let you know. One store always stands out as being honest and trustworthy. As for buyng a bow - same thing applies - unless you're buying one of the cheapest bows on the market, don't even think of doing it without trying it out first. And don't be fooled into buying one of those fibre-glass monsters - they're absolute rubbish.

Violinia

Anybody who buys a violin online without trying it out is asking for trouble. They may get lucky but chances are they won't. It's got to feel right! Do you really want all the trouble of buying one, sending it back and then repeating the process until you find one you like? Sounds mad to me. <snip>

It may sound mad, but it could also save you a VAST amount of money. Postage each way is perhaps £10. If you are looking to spend several hundred pounds and can make a saving of perhaps £200, that's 20 lots of postage, or return postage on 10 violins. Will you find one you really like before then? If you do your research first then very probably you will. Remember we're not talking about thousands of pounds worth of instruments here. If you end up driving around to several different shops then the petrol costs will mount up too.

And don't be fooled into buying one of those fibre-glass monsters - they're absolute rubbish.

Depends on what they are being compared with. A fibreglass bow is £20 or £25. Cheap wood bows do not last very long at all before they bend. Don't make the mistake of comparing today's fibreglass bows with the early P&H artificial hair ones, and especially don't make the mistake of thinking that carbon composite or carbon graphite is the same thing as firbreglass!

Liz

I am very glad Violinia has raised this topic. The advice she gives is I suspect in line with the majority of violin teachers in this country. It is certainly in line with my teacher's approach when I got big enough for a full size violin about 18 years ago. She called in a trusted violin dealer friend of hers from Manchester, he brought about 3 or 4 violins in the price range £300 - £350, and it was a really fun experience trying them out, and listening to my teacher showing off on them. One violin "felt" right for me above all the others, my teacher was humming and ha- ing about a different one, but she was really pleased (more so than my father) to find I had picked the £350 one.

Violinia in fact raises two quite distinct issues concerning buying over the internet. The first is only hinted at by her comments about the ability to check the reputability of the local violin shop, and whether it has been repeatedly ripping people off. As a general proposition I wholeheartedly agree that there are very good reasons for being extra careful in buying over the internet. However I want to make some comments specifically in relation to Elida Trading. Liz Ward's business is not based in "cyberspace" but in the modestly sized town of Huddersfield near Leeds. The civil and criminal laws of England apply to her and her business. I personally have bought 3 instruments from her which have all arrived as described at super speed. She has also helped me out with strings and bits and bobs. In fact one thing I have had off Liz is a 1/8 size cello bow to replace the one which was provided by the "local reputable dealer with a shop in the town centre". He had provided a bow which snapped near the frog the day it arrived, and despite repeated enquiries by me and promises by him was not replaced. Her "shop window" is the internet, and her website has been up and running to my knowledge for many months now, which would suggest that many of her customers, particularly her initial customers, are capable of using the internet to look at violins. If she were a criminal rip off merchant, it would be surprising beyond belief that in all the months she has been in operation there does not appear to be a single negative comment about her not just on this forum, but anywhere you can google to. I think it is as wrong to generalise that you can't trust anyone who deals over the internet as it is to generalise that you can necessarily impute "added trust" to a business because it is local to you.

Violinia's second point is a very relevant factor. Even in the field of legitimate honest dealers there is a huge advantage to trying what you are buying before you buy it. That way you get to choose the one you like best. I have to say that Liz's soundfiles link on another thread here only emphasises this point - the soundfiles are an extremely poor alternative to hearing and playing the violin, in my view to the point of being almost useless.

It would also be a nuisance to have to return a violin if you didn't like it (although not that much of a nuisance - if you open the packaging and bubble wrap carefully I don't see why you couldn't send the whole thing back in the same packaging it arrived in). There is also some postage cost, although not all that much.

The onus is very much on the shoulders of those advocating a purchase over the internet to give reasons for doing so which outweigh the uncertainties and potential nuisance of "not seeing before you buy".

I believe, as do an increasing number of other people, that in the case of Gliga violins that onus has been met. The point is this, and it is broadly the point made in the Time Magazine article on Gliga violins. The cost of a violin is contributed to by the cost of materials, the cost of labour, and the profit margin of the dealer. An internet dealership has lower overheads than a town centre shop. But more fundamentally than that, the same piece of Carpathian maple and the same many many hours of skilled labour will simply cost more in Germany than it will in Romania. To put it in perspective the Time article states that "[Gliga's employees], considered an elite workforce, earn twice the national average of $100 a month." All of that would be irrelevant in the hands of cretins who don't know what they are doing, but Vasile Gliga is a master luthier, whose craftsmanship has been praised by Yehudi Menuhin.
Under his direction all the feedback, not just on vested websites but on discussion groups across the web, shows that he is producing for any given price violins, violas and cellos which by comparison with Western European instruments would be in a completely different price league. I was very pleased when I chose my £350 violin mentioned above, but the Gliga I now have is in a totally different league. If anyone visiting Chester wants a go on one, PM me and you can try mine. As more of these instruments are seen by teachers and in orchestras I hope there will be a greater degree of interest in them, but for people for instance who need to get a full size violin now, they haven't got time to wait for the general opinion of the violin community to harmonise. There is an opportunity in certain price brackets to hit way above their weight in terms of the violin they get, and to categorise the increasing number of people who have done this as "mad" is one dimensional and wrong.

As to the glasser composite bows provided by Elida; I bought a complete 15" viola outfit for my wife for £285 all in. That included a glasser composite bow. Whilst not as nice as my decent wooden violin bow, the bow is perfectly fine, certainly not "rubbish", and I would much rather not have bought £150 more bow and got £150 less viola. In any event all outfits are quoted with a separate price for "instrument only" if you want to get your own more expensive bow. Glasser also do carbon fibre bows. My daughter's cello teacher is a member of the Liverpool Phil and he uses a carbon fibre bow as a "second bow" for outdoor concerts and the like - he is perfectly happy with it.

Well thank you again, Zoda. Goodness me, this gets embarrassing.

I confess that when we first realised almost exactly two years ago, that there was no-one else in the UK importing Gligas, we were flabbergasted. There have, apparently, been one or two who have imported on an irregular basis, though Gliga told us only one had imported direct from them so perhaps the others came in via the US which would of course increase the price. On the other hand, when one analyses it, is it so surprising? getting a new brand off the ground takes a LOT of work. Even with all the Gliga publicity in the US we only sold Gligas very slowly to start with, and unsold stock costs money. Also working out payment methods when dealing with countries outside those that routinely take credit cards is not easy at first, no doubt busy retailers simply do not have time to work it out. But there is more to it than that.

Teacher recommendations, quite rightly, are taken very seriously by most parents (and those that don't take the teacher seriously are likely to buy the very cheapest instrument they can find) and if the teacher recommends a Zeller or a Stentor Conservatoire or a Poller, it is not at all easy to convince parents that what you have is superior: the parents think the teachers know. Well, unless the teachers are in a position to visit all the trade fairs, they DON'T know, and why should they? We are in the trade and there are plenty of new violins out there that WE don't know.

There are still teachers out there who think Chinese violin = unplayable rubbish and German violin = high quality. It isn't that simple any more. Things have changed so much that two brand name cellos, both Chinese and with ebonised fittings, have been highly praised by professional players / high level teachers who are quoted on the website for these brands, and yet by today's standards there is FAR better out there for the same money, it's just that those players and teachers remember a time when Chinese instruments were unplayable and anything playable and cheap was going to impress. I was TERRIBLY impressed with the first batch of new Chinese violins we had here, I thought they must be really exceptional because, hey, the tuning pegs moved properly and the bridge fitted! It was only when we looked into chinese violins for ourselves that in realised that what I had thought must be far and away the best Chinese violins were in fact amongst the lower quality ones. Things had changed that much in the seven years since I had last been teaching violin.

Incidentally it is FAR worse in the field of woodwind sales but that is not something for this forum.

We find that young players overwhelmingly choose the Glasser Advanced Composite bow over any wood bow within our price range (we go up to about £150) and it saddens me to hear things like "my son much preferred the Glasser but the teacher said to go for the Brazilwood one" - surely a child in middle grades has the right to some say about the bow they prefer? I think again it is down to teachers simply not knowing the difference betwen fibreglass and anything made from carbon. This overwhelming preference for the Glasser only applies to youngsters: adults seem equally divided, love it or hate it. For example one teacher says he prefers his to his W.E. Hill bow which is insured for thousands, but some adults reject them immediately as too heavy.

Liz