Hi violin lovers/experts,

Would appreciate your help advise to buy a violin for an absolute beginner in violin.
The person is full-size, have on-going experience as piano player.

I have visited the violin lovers website, in fact learning a lot from this forum, including Elizabeth Ward`s advices, but now need further advice to choose one from the following website :

http://www.gligaviolins.com/ShowCateg.php?Gems%202|Gems%202%20Special&Vioara&4/4

Thank you all and God Bless,
Michelle

it`s really down to personal choice. My advice would be to get four adjusters and dominant strings, and personally the Guaneris don`t do a lot for me so i`d stick to the strad model. Other than that, it`s just down to cosmetics.

Liz

What she said.

Liz

My teacher was impressed with the bow and suggested it was worth getting it re-haired to fulfil its potential (I, of course, am a limiting factor).

Today, I took it to my local specialist and while we were chatting, someone came in with a violin they had bought goodness knows where. It was a cheap violin, and did it show. The pegs did not fit, the bridge was badly set and there were terrible, thin steel strings (this for a nine year old). Their face fell as the owner explained the cost of bringing it up to scratch. They said they would take it back for a refund but, I don`t know if they would have any luck. It would seem they got what they paid for.

The point of all this? Go to a specialist. Liz was very helpful and I am delighted with my fiddle.

Before we started selling new violins, we sold used ones on ebay. That of course meant we had to buy them in. One I remember vividly as being worse than any I had ever seen, and apparently it came new from a local non-specialist music shop. It was literally unplayable, not the first i have seen that was literally unplayable, but in this case it was literally unplayable several times over. I could not even play a two octave G major scale on it. The bridge was incredibly high (and this with steel strings, the poor child`s fingers must have hurt!) and was so badly shaped that it was literally impossible to stay on the right string. The pegs were a nightmare and the bow was only fit for the dustbin.

I had to teach on violins bought from non-specialist shops, and ten years ago such violins were often unplayable. I have spent time in lessons actually poking needles through the tuning pegs to make a hole to thread the strings through, and trying, using a nailfile, to put a curve on the bridge, or trying to achieve the same result by putting pieces of paper under the strings on the bridge to adjust the height.

Things have changed, that is the good news. the first new Chinese violin we bought in was sold to us (by a US ebay eller) as "European", later he confessed he meant "European quality" and that it was made in China. Despite having only ebonised fittings and painted purfling, this violin blew my mind because it worked! i tried to persuade the seller to ship larger number to us by surface mail, but fortunately he refused, because once we started looking we found that his violins were by no means the best available, that is how much things had changed just in the eight years since I had been teaching. It is rare now to find a new unplayable violin. i`m not saying it is impossible but I have never found one.

To be fair, the standards of a specialist violin shop are high, probably far higher than the standards of most teachers (unless the teacher is lucky enough to have a lot of pupils with wealthy and committed parents) and also such shops have a strong motivation to discourage online purchases. The violin may not actually have been quite as bad as he was saying (good idea to let the teacher see it first)

liz