Back in July I had a lucky day finding two violas and a violin at Gloucester Green market. All of them have red paint splattered on them but I can live with that. May have served in some kind of art project. I've now set up one viola (number 3) and am working on the other. The one I have set up turned out sounding very nice, so I immediately took it to a session and played it quite a bit and I'm very happy with it. It is an interesting mental exercise to transpose the tunes I play on the violin to fit them into the lower register of the viola.
So here's the one I set up and the other one in the state I found it, kind of a before and after photo.
It looks a little bit disproportioned because I set it up with a violin bridge. The viola bridges I ordered turned out to be much too big for these, so I preferred having a bridge on the small side rather than one where I have to throw away lots of material and still end up with too much. I may have been lucky with the one I randomly picked to set up first, because so far I haven't been able to get equally nice sounds out of the other one, and the pegs are causing me a bit of trouble. But I'm still hopeful it will be playable some time soon.
It would be weird if they really sounded so different, because they are the same size (15 1/2 inches), have the same provenance, and the same label, saying Berini with the drawing of a cat playing fiddle:
According to this post about a similar Berini viola with the cat label, they may have been made in Czechoslovakia.
Since the last pirate luthier post, I've also made the half-size cello playable and handed it back to the youth orchestra folks who are keen on using it.
NB I've now moved the list of instruments that pass through my pirate luthier workshop to a permanent page which I will update whenever necessary, independent of the blog entries.
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