Last week, I had taken my Viola d'amore back to the luthier who had made it, to have a new bridge recut and fitted after it was a bit jury-rigged for a repair a couple of years ago. It's a bit of a trek to get out there, almost 2.5 hours by train. I had gone on Thursday morning to drop it off... and was planning to pick it up the next day (the setting takes some time, as the tension from the strings will shift the feet around a bit).
However, I ended up getting stuck with the editing recording... and needed the time on Friday to finish it. So, I ended up going yesterday... which was lucky, as the whole of Netherlands went into a stricter lockdown starting from midnight yesterday. That would have made it a bit more difficult to get the instrument... not impossible, just annoying.
Anyway, I was at the luthier's place when the Google global outage took place... I completely missed it... I was just sitting having a coffee and chatting... in the old fashioned way, so not looking at the phone whilst talking with someone else! I had fired up Google Photos to show him photos of my newest violin, but for some reason Google wasn't able to find photos of my violin... so, I thought nothing of it... and kept chatting and drinking. Apparently, there was a worldwide shortage of YouTube at that very moment...
Anyway, you can now see that the feet of the bridge are properly flush against the body of the instrument. Earlier, they were not quite flush... and the tension on this instrument makes it a pain in the arse to reset without taking down some of the strings (Much easier on Violin where you can do that with the strings in place). Still, he carved a better fit in addition to resetting it. This sort of thing makes a huge difference to the sound as the vibrations from the strings are properly transmitted with minimal loss through the bridge to the sounding boards of the body.
Meanwhile, the channels for the 7 sympathetic strings are now properly aligned with the newer angle of the neck. On the old bridge, they were too high and they were starting to touch the underside of the fingerboard and making buzzing noises. This was due to the fact that the neck angle changed over time as the instrument was under tension from the strings.
Lastly, he actually replaced the bass sympathetic string! I had snapped that a year or so ago... and they are such a pain in the arse to replace as you need to thread them blind through a nut under the fingerboard and out into the pegbox. The bass string is the least resonant of the strings anyway... so, I could do without it for a while!
So... nice to have the instrument back in my custody again! I have some things that I want to start learning on it!
