It's always better to learn on an adequate instrument. A bad instrument won't inspire one to learn.
The more important thing on any instrument is to have a decent setup, good placement of the sound post, good strings, a bridge that fits the top and is at a good height, etc.

A good violinist can make a bad instrument sound pretty good. And vise-versa.

If I had to do it over, I'd get me an old used rental unit. Yes, it's all about setup. That renter doesn't want to see that violin come back every week.

Don't forget the bow! A bow is at least as important. Straight, firm, well haired. A used bow will be primed too. I could play a crappy fiddle for a night or two, but not a crappy bow.

Since I actually own two decent fiddles, I DO make a difference bteween the two. Now that my oldest fiddle has a newly carved bridge, and now that the neck that was lowered has been put back and the problem got solved with an extra piece of wood and the instrument got cleaned and has a new set of Helicores with a titanium A string, it is pretty obvious to me this instrument beats my newest and first fiddle. It is a lot easier to play and offers more perspective this way. I just love my old violin and the repair was worth the price! It has a nice dark red brown colour and shines like a mirror now and it plays away like it is nothing.
There has to be a difference, I already notice a difference between my two fiddles.

I've said it before and, woe is me & my bank account, I'll say it again. If you go to a quality violin/fiddle shop and sweet talk one of the salespeople into letting you listen to them play fiddles of various prices and quality, you will find to your ire/dismay that, yes, a good percentage of the time the pricier merch does indeed sound better.

A good setup and good bow make it a bit more possible to learn. Fiddling is hard to begin with. Starting out with a poorly setup instrument with a poorly made bow is adding unnecessary difficulty to the process. R/

A lot of that has to do with playing up the neck, or at least that's what I was told when I bought someone's fiddle who was upgrading. He was told this by his instructor.

learn2turn - You're a skier - are there differences between skis? (I know there are). Do you think a beginner should learn on a high end racing ski, or a top pro race on a bargain pair from the sporting goods store at the mall? Its the same with violins - when you're learning you don't need the response and singing tone of a fine violin, but you might as you progress. As to how this is achieved by luthiers I don't really know, but an easy to play setup and fairly pleasing tone is desirable at any level.

quote:

---

Originally posted by DougD

learn2turn - You're a skier - are there differences between skis? (I know there are). Do you think a beginner should learn on a high end racing ski, or a top pro race on a bargain pair from the sporting goods store at the mall? Its the same with violins - when you're learning you don't need the response and singing tone of a fine violin, but you might as you progress. As to how this is achieved by luthiers I don't really know, but an easy to play setup and fairly pleasing tone is desirable at any level.

---

Yes, I'm a skier and including 20-years as an instructor with a handful of certifications and accreditation.  But isn't the situation different?  With sports equipment there would be reason why more advanced equipment is worse, possibly much worse, for a beginner.  But the converse is not necessarily the same.  I could explain why a world cup racer couldn't run a race with a beginner ski.   But what I can't explain is why advanced violin student could not play a complicated piece on a lower level student violin. 

All things being equal between 2 fiddles, like exact same set up, 100% the same down to string spacing, nut heights, neck thickness, angle etc etc, so they play the same. The more expensive instrument is going to sound better. The more expensive instrument, the luthier has the time and interest to carefully carve and tone tap the plates, shape and tune the bass bar, carefully make, install and sand corner blocks and inner binding, along with the 100's of other tiny , fastidious things that go into making a good violin, all which make for a better sounding fiddle.

Take your reasonably proficient fiddler ( not a rank beginner - they will sound like crap on anything!) and play both. The better instrument will sound like it.

Hey I first learned on a borrowed piece of junk! Real junk - painted on purfling, God knows what else under the hood. But it got me started. Same thing with guitar, I started on a Jap electric with a neck like half a baseball bat and the fidelity of a soup can with a string. If you keep up with playing, at some point you need a better instrument. And money.

I have been asked to shop for violins with moms whose kids are starting lessons…and some of the “under $500” ones were really hard to play…like, difficult to hit the D without hitting the A…high action so you can’t play fast without tired fingers… so if you try a piece with a lot of fast string crossings and high positions, it feels impossible! On a better instrument which has been set up nicely, the same piece can feel effortless…

But I agree, it will not hurt a beginning player to have a very nice instrument, of course!
But I think it will hamper an advanced student to have a poorly made instrument…

....when you're learning you don't need the response and singing tone of a fine violin....

I think this would be an absolutely ideal  situation, but who forks out the price for a fine violin when they're just beginning.

I didn't either, because I was very lucky to borrow a friends violin and it must of been a fine instrument. When my friend requested his fiddle be returned, I went straight to the violin shop and got my own fiddle, but I wasn't happy with this instrument because it didn't match the quality of fiddle I borrowed. I made several returns to the shop to to upgrade the fiddle each time, and I ended up with a fine German violin. Years later I took that fiddle to a Luthier and he suggested the fiddle could do with cleaning the old rosin collected on the belly, and to re-angle the fingerboard because the bridge was quit low. When I got my fiddle back it sounded like a different instrument, it was resonating and singing like I never heard before.

If you are learning to play 'violin' properly and not just learning to play fiddle tunes, the response of a fine violin will facilitate rapid progress, especially in the aspect of intonation, the ringing is unmistakable when in tune. Where as the lower quality violins the response is dull. 

A good fiddle/violin helps keep your spirit up as you work on developing your skills. The better sound out-and-out seduces you into playing & practicing more than you really ought to. Think with your heart, not with your cerebral cortex. Think with your gut, not with that internal adding machine otherwise known as your conscience.

On the shopping thing…

first guitar - I went to the music store, plucked on a few, and bought my favorite. I played it for years! I really enjoyed it.

Second guitar: Now I knew a lot more…I knew that I wanted a solid rosewood back. I knew that for the clear focused sound I was after, spruce would be better than cedar. I knew that Spanish-made guitars were considered the best…which workshops and makers were respected, etc. With that in mind, the price tag for guitar #2 was way higher! And it is a beautiful guitar made in a small Spanish workshop (Picado) with a clear ringing tone, lovely and sweet in the high registers…but when I was starting out, I would not have even known what to look for! A guitar was a guitar. :-)

I think this is similar to what fiddlers/violinists will go through…You start to look for certain things, as you gain playing experience…

I have two violins. One is a Czech-Slovakia fiddle (a trade fiddle made, according to my research, just a short walk across the border from Markneukirchen in Luby) and Yita shop fiddle from China. Both acquired more or less by happenstance. Both sound good and I play them almost equally but it is obvious that the clarity on the G and D strings is much better on the Yita than the Czech trade fiddle. I asked a young man who was a music major in performance in a masters college program if what I was noticing was accurate and reflected the relative value of the violins. He said yes and he said if I moved up another level in violins I would notice the clarity improved in the A and E strings also. From my observation and playing the clarity on the lower two strings really helps when playing something like Big John McNeil which uses those two lower strings extensively on the A part. I have played more expensive violins than either of my two, but have yet to discern a big difference in the sound I get on the upper two strings. Assuming I'm not quite at a level to appreciate that yet.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

I've said it before and, woe is me & my bank account, I'll say it again. If you go to a quality violin/fiddle shop and sweet talk one of the salespeople into letting you listen to them play fiddles of various prices and quality, you will find to your ire/dismay that, yes, a good percentage of the time the pricier merch does indeed sound better.

---

I like this sweet talk suggestion hehe. I might try it one day. But extra challenge here would be to convince the luthier to first please cross tune it. I bet I will get a lot of question marks and frowning here hahaha. 

A good instrument will give you the means to draw on a much wider spectrum of sounds and it will respond well across all registers. Especially good instruments speak with ease and seem to come alive when the bow just touches the string.

Although it doesn’t always do so directly, price does often correlate to sound quality. Part of this is because the more expensive a violin is, the higher the expectations of it and the more time people will devote to setting it up and repairing it. There’s an argument that the greatest violins are as great as they are because they have had so much time put into making them great. That doesn’t mean you can’t find something that’s very good at a cheaper price, only that the chances of finding it are slimmer. Just as there are great sounding cheap violins, there are terrible sounding expensive violins, but these are the exceptions.

A lot of people buy or rent entry level violins when starting out so they’re not putting a lot of money into something they may not stick with and figure they’ll upgrade when they advance or remain interested. It’s true that the tonal requirements aren’t as great for a violin that’s being used for elementary repertoire that only covers a limited range of the violin. As soon as one begins to advance into repertoire that asks more of violin and player, the limitations of a violin become clearer. That’s why teachers will sometimes look at violins in terms of what one can expect to play on them (e.g. good enough response throughout registers for the Bruch concerto). Since teachers have such a heavy influence on what their students buy, these assessments are important to sellers who cater to the market.

Is it better to start with more violin than you need? It certainly doesn’t do any harm, but it isn’t strictly necessary, either. It does give you something you can grow into, but just as taking your first driving lesson in a Ferrari won’t make you a better driver, playing a Strad in your first lesson won’t make you sound like an artist; in both cases, it takes someone with skill and understanding to truly appreciate the high performance and design ingenuity in the products. I’ve worked with some teachers from the Russian school who were adamant that their students learn on instruments that were just about unplayable, but somehow they’ve always seemed to get surprisingly good results. In that way of teaching you have to earn a good violin by learning to draw a tone out of a mediocre instrument with cheap strings. But that’s just one approach, and there are many roads to Rome.

Often the choice of instrument is simply dictated by the budget of the buyer, and in many cases the violin is just one expense to add in with those of several other activities for kids, so the question of whether to spend more than is necessary is moot. Adult learners tend to have one of their few advantages there because their means are often more extensive. Many decide that they want to make the path to progress as smooth as they can by buying quality from the start instead of working up to it.

If you play well enough to be able to appreciate the differences in violins (this is a key consideration that is far too often glossed over), a visit to a shop where you can play instruments at various levels will demonstrate more clearly what you get as you go up in price. It’s a double-edged sword because it’s exciting to play incredible instruments but it’s disheartening to have to hand them back and to realize that everything else is less exciting. Be careful what you wish for.

Rich, I knew you'd come along to say it more succinctly - the Ferrari analogy is perfect. Too much violin can make every error in technique stand out like a sore thumb, I have one that I love now but when I first got it (given to me) I had a heck of a time not squeaking and squalling. Set it aside for a decade while I worked out issues on a more forgiving instrument. I think that fiddle really prefers synthetics too and I put steel on it back then.

Years ago when I lived in Michigan, I met a lady who owned an ugly beat up fiddle. Everybody who played her fiddle thought is was unplayable. But when she played her fiddle she sounded so good people would "stop in their tracks" and ask who was playing that fiddle. That is a true story. The lady was a school bus driver and practiced her fiddle whenever the bus was waiting for something. A violin instructor at the University of Michigan advised her against taking lessons. He said if she changed her playing technique it would take her a very long time to sound as good as she currently did. There are more inadequate fiddlers than there are inadequate fiddles. And, there are no "magic" instruments.

Violins are NOT priced according to tone quality. They are priced based on the following primarily objective qualities:

- Maker or workshop
- Condition
- Appearance
- Model
- Size and specifications
- Geographic origin
- Age
- Provenance

That's it.

Violins are purchased by players based on price, tone preferences, and playing qualities usually in comparison to other violins in the same price range.

Tone is both subjective and malleable. Tone of a particular violin can change dramatically based on set-up, strings installed, and bow used to play it. This is why violins are not priced according to tone no matter what a dealer tries to tell you.

As a collector, I have bought and sold many violins over 40 years. I have taken dozens of instruments in for written appraisals for insurance purposes by different expert appraisers and never, not once, has the appraiser asked to hear or play the instrument in order to appraise its value because tone is not how violins are priced. Tone is irrelevant to a pricing appraisal by a professional, but tone is extremely important to the buyer.