Don Rickert Musical Instruments(tm)

Think About that Chinese Fiddle

This is NOT the promised third posting about changes we are going to make to www.FiddleandBowStore.com. That is coming soon, but this rant came out of my fingertips first. If it sounds a bit like sour grapes. I'll admit to it now in order to save you the trouble of pointing this out in your emails (why don't people use the comment feature of blogs?)

We at Rickert & Ringholz have been able to determine that a lot of violin students (actually, their parents), as well as a surprisingly large number of adult fiddlers, get "great deals" on instruments from China. All the so-called top-name online stores (won't name them...can't afford to be sued this week) sell Chinese instruments, using marketing verbage in the product descriptions that is the equivalent of polishing a t**d.

The ready availability of Chinese instruments is a primary reason for why people don't buy high quality instruments, which happen to be expensive. I guess we are all looking for a great deal...you know, the hundred year fiddle from the old man at the flea market or yard sale who doesn't know its real value, the $100 "steal" on eBay, and so on. OK, every now and then you get lucky, especially at yard sales. Whether this is morally defensible is another question altogether (the correct answer is NO. it's not!).

As far as eBay goes, you are more often than not going to end up with a piece of junk or a NEW Chinese instrument made in the "Italian" or the "French" or the whatever tradition that sounds classy. Ask yourself this: do you really think that a professional eBay vendor (look at the seller's number of sales when you buy) is going to NOT make a profit? Think again.

This brings us to back to Chinese violins. The cheap ones are either painted or so heavily varnished that you can't tell what instrument is under all of that gloss. The better ones, costing several hundred dollars, have a very distinctive feature...perfect "old spruce" top and unbelievably well-flamed sides and back. Hate to burst your bubble, but the flaming is a really good paint job under the varnish and the perfect "old spruce" top is a printed shrink "skin", sort of like that used on cheap wall paneling. We'll show you some pictures after we have our upcoming "radical de-construction" of a Chinese violin. This may involve fireworks that are legal in the States where they are sold...look for it on YouTube under DoctorFiddle in the next week or so.

The techniques mentioned above keep the costs down, which keeps the sales price low, but the unethically cheap labor really keeps the costs and sales price down.

Think about all of these things as you play your POS fiddle made by underpaid, and often under-aged labor.

To paraphrase William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement (known chiefly for his wallpaper prints), who was no Angel himself as a business-person, but who wrote many on-point essays: Quality products designed to last a long time cost more money than garbage that merchants who provide it to you are secretly ashamed to sell you...that is if they let themselves introspect beyond the greatest cop-out of the last several centuries..."It's just business; nothing personal."

Note: Needless to say, we don't sell Chinese instruments at www.FiddleandBowStore.com. The closest thing we have to a sweat shop is our own design studio and workshops in Atlanta and Birmingham.

iolin, fiddle, Chinese, William Morris, cheap, sweatshop, Don Rickert, www.FiddleandBowStore.com, Rickert and Ringholz Musical Instruments

Changes to www.FiddleandBowStore.com (Part 1): Observations and Insights from Fiddlers' Conventions

Over at www.FiddleandBowStore.com, our online store, we referred people to this blog for information about our observations and insights to date and changes we will be making to the store based on these observations and insights. This posting deals with the observations and insights part.

Fiddlers' Conventions (from the vendor perspective): Note--all of these generalizations do not apply to all events.

• Blessing and Rude awakening 1: Meet great people, make friends, etc., but very few people actually buy anything. You are considered lucky (by other vendors) if you make enough money to pay the vendor fee, food and gas and break even.
• Rude awakening 2: People don't want to buy new fiddles. Rather, they would like YOU to buy their old fiddles.
• Rude awakening 3: Drunks...Fiddlers' conventions that allow drinking can get pretty scarey late at night, especially the big ones, such as the one whose name begins with a "G". It is very prudent to become very good friends with your fellow vendors, especially if at least one of them has experience as a bar bouncer, who will help you get rid of the drunk asleep in your booth area.
• Ray of hope 1: People DO buy lots of bows, including the expensive ones.
• Ray of hope 2: Australians...they love Old Time and Bluegrass music, are really nice, and can hold thier beer. Plus, people who have the money to travel half-way around the world to attend a festival usually have the money to buy stuff. This is helped by the fact that the U.S. Dollar/Australian Dollar exchange rate is not that bad and there is some sort of really high tax in the land down-under on things like bows; thus making even an expensive American bow a real bargain.
• Ray of hope 3: People love the cigar box fiddles. They don't actually buy them, because they are not cheap, but they do love them.
• Interesting: It is pretty much guaranteed that, whatever you have to sell, people will want stuff that you do not have.
• Annoying: It is not even worth selling strings and digital tuners, as the expected pricing is somewhere around wholesale. If you hold to a reasonable discount, the vendor down the lane will sell at or below cost just to make a sale.
• Exciting: In some locations, there are many Civil War re-enactors with a real interest in period instruments and skill in playing them.

We'll post about our experience with www.FiddleandBowStore.com tomorrow or the next day. Comments to this posting are most welcome.

fiddle, fiddlers' conventions, insights, Rickert and Ringholz, Don Rickert, cigar box fiddles

The Violin Was Perfected 300 Years Ago...Hogwash!

This is one of those quick, terse blog entries, because I am supposed to be cleaning up my shop to start on prototyping several new instruments.

With the general slowdown of the Holiday period and having the flu (should have gotten that flu shot), I have been looking at a lot of violin and fiddle related websites and blogs and have seen far too many assertions that the violin was perfected centuries ago. This ranks up there on the idiocy scale as the statement by the Director of the U.S. Patent Office early in the 20th Century that the Office was no longer needed, because everything worth inventing had already been invented.

The violin was not perfected three hundred or even 400 years ago (I prefer the Magginis of the early 1600s myself). What was perfected was a basic design pattern for a particular type of violin adopted for particular types of music. Heck, even Thomas Jefferson, who was in debt up to his ears, but managed to get an Amati and one of the first Tourte bows (which were considered as outrageous as IncrediBows when first introduced) did not dare take his Amati to the local pub for a fiddling jam session. He took a Dancing Master's Pochette, for which he had a leather saddle case made. The best pochette in the world would not have compared to an Amati, Strad or Guarnerius, but it was absolute perfection for Tom J's immediate problem, getting to a pub and back home on horseback, with a lot of drinking and playing in between.

That's all for the moment...back to the shop to get ready for our next effort at divergence from stupid perfection. Probably something old Antonio did a number of times. By all accounts, he was just as irreverent about stupid traditions as the irreverence embodied in these words.

More to come I am sure. Let the comments fly, but keep it clean, as I have the "Block User" button and I'm not afraid to use it :-)

DR

violin, fiddle, Stradivarius, Maggini, Amati, perfection, pochette, Don Rickert, Rickert & Ringholz