Re-graduating violins, a blessing or a curse?

I have a 7/8 birds-eye violin that was described by Dalton Potter as "way too heavy" and he explained that the top could be regraded to improve the sound, but that he didn't think the violin was worth it. I then found a luthier in Richmond who was working for Jane Kapeller, and this luthier (I don't remember his name) said he could regrade the top and clean the violin for some ridiculously low price like $400. I decided to take the risk. In the end, the violin did sound better but it didn't become a great violin. I don't have any regrets about it.

For some luthiers it has become a specialty. My great-great-grandfather advertised revoicing of instruments as one of his areas of expertise. In his day (and still to this day in many cases) commercial instruments were made with very thick plates that weren’t given much care or thought on the inside. Because they sounded rather poor to players, the values stayed at a negligible point for at least a century, which made it easy for a skilled luthier to buy them in quantity for very little and then turn them into instruments that were astonishingly better and then sell them at a reasonable price that allowed the luthier to make a modest profit while giving the player a good deal as well. Now that prices for old factory violins are rising dramatically, that market has changed.

When I worked at The Violin House of Weaver, my specialty was regraduation and installation of new bassbars in good or fine old instruments and sometimes in new ones as well. Over the years I worked on thousands of instruments. I also did this work in addition to setup, repair, and restoration for a few other shops as well before establishing my own business.

For a violin shop, instruments that sit on the shelves and collect dust for years can be a major money sink. If they can’t be set up to sound good enough to sell, they either have to be dumped at auctions or wholesaled to dealers at a loss. Or they can be revoiced to improve their chances in the showroom.

Is it dangerous operation? Yes. Doing so involves the removal of original material and poor workmanship can ruin the instrument entirely. If, for example, a top is thinned too much, the instrument may be lively and exciting under the ear at first, but it will be weak structurally, so in time it will lose its initial appealing qualities and deteriorate to the point that it’s worse than it was originally. The luthier who does this work needs to understand wood very well and have a nuanced understanding of violin construction and sound.

Is there any way to reverse regraduation? Yes and no. You can’t put the old wood back once it’s gone, but you can put in large patches of new wood to return the instrument to its original dimensions. I remember seeing a presentation of a priceless instrument where wood was put in to cover almost all of the inside of the top to undo regraduation. The owner of the shop wanted a token amount of original wood to be visible, so the restorer left one small patch of the original wood exposed but covered everything else. Will a violin sound the same after this kind of work? Quite likely it won’t. Patching will improve structure and will hopefully improve sound as well, but it’s not something that can be predicted very well. Restorations are often carried out between owners because the tonal results are hard to predict. As Heraclitus reminds us, “A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

It’s also my belief that the statement “original in all its principal parts” on a certificate is not intended to include the inside of the violin; this is worded as such precisely so that shops have the latitude to make adjustments like regraduation in order to sell violins. There are precious few del Gesu instruments with original graduations for reference because they were regraduated to make them easier to play. Most of the great violins that everyone knows and loves are substantially different than they were when they left the workbench (not even getting into the conversion to mortised neck). If no one was allowed to make any changes, the number of good-sounding violins would be dramatically lower and some would just never sell. I don’t think any of the great makers expected their violins to have such a long lifespan and they themselves were quite willing to make changes to existing instruments—in those days it was common to throw a plate away if it was cracked and simply make a new one. The reverence for the original materials has only grown over time since it was realized just how well violins could survive if kept carefully and with the development of advanced repair and restoration technique.

As stated above, wood can be replaced with different wood to preserve structure. Varnish is much harder to replicate. That being said, there are a number of precious violins out there that have flown under the radar with different varnishes if they were done well enough. One of the reasons that attributions or certificates change over time is that experts discover these things.

Violins by individual makers should be considered as creative works of art or at least works of high craftsmanship. They should not be defiled because one person does not like the sound any more than a painting should be modified because someone doesn't like the artist’s colors. If an individual or dealer does not like the tone of a violin and they can’t fix it by set-up or adjustments, then they should pass it on. Chances are that there is somebody who will like it.

And there is no guarantee that regraduation will improve the tone, anyway. It can just as easily make things worse and it is irreversible.

The old mass-produced 20th C. German violins were hurriedly assembled from parts made by individuals who knew nothing about how to make an entire violin. They were paid by the piece and did not care about what an instrument ultimately sounded like. These mass-produced violins are not individual creative works, and many can be improved by regraduation and thinning the ribs. So nothing is really wrong with that as long as the person knows what they are doing.

And I personally dislike the term "re-voicing." It’s regraduation.

Like so much violin lore, re-graduation seems to be more like superstition than science. I'd be interested to learn exactly what parts of the plate are thinned and whether this is determined by empirical observation or adherence to doctrine. Has anyone published an "optimal" map of plate thickness, and explained how this was arrived at?