The World’s Best Violins Sing Like Humans
Is it unusual that HN discusses violins so often?  Seems like this comes up a lot.<p>One common theme is that extremely expensive old violins aren&#x27;t better than modern, well crafted violins (these new violins are still expensive, but measured in the tens of thousands, not millions).<p>While this doesn&#x27;t surprise me, I do wonder if it misses (to some extent) the point. My guess is that a mass produced, relatively inexpensive violin could very well be as &quot;good&quot; as a more expensive, unique one. But one thing we know about artisanal work is that it&#x27;s expensive because it&#x27;s unique and can&#x27;t be produced through mass production, not because it is strictly better.<p>I like violins, and play them, mainly early jazz, Irish, bluegrass. It&#x27;s clear to me that different people are looking for different things in a violin, and that you may not get this from a mass produced instrument. It&#x27;s not that the more expensive one is <i>better</i> in a blind test, it&#x27;s that it produces a tone that is hard to find in most instruments, and because it&#x27;s fairly unique, you&#x27;ll only find it in an older instrument or a hand crafted one.<p>This article is interesting, in the idea that some violins are altos and some are baritones. This ins&#x27;t surprising, we know that violins (and other musical instruments) excel in different registers, and that there are often trade offs (volume, tone, brightness, richness).<p>Part of the problem, for me, is that I just don&#x27;t get to play very many violins. I don&#x27;t feel ok about going to a high end violin store and playing their instruments all afternoon.<p>But personally, I am on the lookout for something. One thing I really like about Irish music is the airs - slower pieces with long, often open notes, that often aren&#x27;t played with vibrato (sometimes they can&#x27;t be directly played with vibrato, since there is extensive use of open strings).<p>I don&#x27;t want to get into a big debate about whether vibrato &quot;should&quot; be used in Irish airs on fiddle, cause my opinion is go ahead, if you like it. But to me, there&#x27;s something about the way a note can ring, almost like a bell, that you can achieve when you draw the bow properly across the string at a particular harmonic, but don&#x27;t add any additional vibrato.<p>This article has me thinking there&#x27;s probably an analogy to the human voice here as well. Baritones, Altos, but there&#x27;s definitely a style of singing (common in cathedral choirs) that relies on a pinpoint &quot;ring&quot; rather than an operatic vibrato.<p>This article makes me thing there probably are some styles of violin that would excel at producing these notes. Downside, I don&#x27;t have $10,000+ to spend, and I doubt a high end shop would enjoy me running this experiment on their inventory.