Rules, Rules, Rules...
Interviewee: Geoffrey Ovington

“Making violins is not an art,” this was the first, and perhaps most important rule Geoffrey Ovington, a world renown maker of string instruments, told me during our interview. “You have some freedom, but it’s pretty tightly controlled.” he continues, “If you’re an artist, you can make anything you want, nobody is going to tell you what color or size to make it.  If you’re making a violin, you know before you begin it’s going to be 14 inches long, and the color is going to be pretty much between gold and brown.” 

However, the maker does have some brief opportunities to make his instrument unique, “You do get a lot of self expression and every instrument will have their (the makers) personality written all over it. That’s why people can identify the instruments. In my field, you never look at the label on an instrument, you identify the instrument by the way it was made...” and Ovington continues “...that’s the little artistic corner we get.”

You have to be a maker to truly appreciate that little opportunity to  represent yourself. Aside from that, the instrument follows a very strict  system chock-full of rules. Hardwood makes the back, neck, and sides of an instrument, for 300 or 400 years that wood has been maple. Spruce is used for the remainder of the instrument, the remainder being the top. Why spruce?  Simply because it is light, it has a very quick transmission of sound, and despite the fact that it is soft enough to put your fingernail in, it has incredible cross-grain strength, comparable to maple. Spruce is a universal  material in the music world, as Ovington puts it, “Every instrument that has a soundboard, it’s always of spruce. The only exception, is the banjo.” 

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