Bridges and Resonance

Experimenting on bridges is fun and relatively inexpensive. Soundpost placement is the other spot you can really alter the sound of your instrument in an easily-reversible way, but soundposts are quite annoying so you need to be fairly motivated to do this. Bridges are prettier, too.

For directions, read Michael Darnton's bridge-fitting section, in the Setup chapter, and makingtheviolin.com has some good basics as well.

As a disclaimer, you probably won't have too much luck going crazily experimental on a standard violin bridge. More resonance, I have discovered, is not automatically better, and the standard is standard for a reason. That being said, most bridges are poorly fitted and very far from the correct spec and you can vastly improve your sound by buying a couple blanks and making well-fitted feet and the correct string angle and lowering or raising the action to your taste.

For an octave violin, this is not the case, since nothing else is standard. My theory is that this instrument needs all the help it can get to resonate those big notes on such a small body. I made a fairly standard bridge and a very open bridge to compare.

The open bridge was much louder and more responsive than the standard one. It is a huge improvement -- from not-really-playable-in-public to useful as a performance instrument. I can't recommend it enough. Besides, it looks cool.