Project: Silk Purse Page 1

The old idiom is: "You cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear"

OK, so we're not going to turn this thing into a silk purse, what do you expect for under $100 -
but we can hope to reduce the oinking noises coming from the case.

The usual disclaimers apply: I am NOT responsible for what *you* do with this information.

I needed a quiet violin both to keep from bothering the neighbors and because I have bad tinnitus in the left ear in part from playing noisy violins for some years when younger.  I'd been reading the 'Amplified Strings' threads on fiddleforum.com off and on for some years and knew it had to be an electric, besides I could try out some of the effects pedals from my acoustic/electric guitar. 
It took a fair amount of research time to winnow out the completely unusable fleaBay rubbish from the possibly redeemable fleaBay rubbish. Looking at the auctions for several days was required to figure out what the 'going rate' for the various brands/vendors. I finally focused on one and 'won' the fourth unit I tried bidding on (the usual method - dropping in the final and only bid with ten seconds to go in the auction). 
So here's what we started with:

 As the seller said, it ships 'bridge down for safety' and I'm guessing that's the way it was from the factory.

And this is what showed up about a week later. It was less awful than I expected.

One thing about me, I like to tear things apart to see what makes'em tick so here's what the guts look like once removed. Don't freak out, you don't have to tear everything apart like this.

 The big black thing is the battery compartment which you have to remove to get everything else out. The Bridge, base, pickup (grey thin rectangle on a wire) and preamp can all clearly be seen.

The preamp was also better than expected. The Pots aren't bad and the chip you can see there looks like a Texas Instruments TL062C JFet input Op-Amp. Should have a 10 MOhm input impedance if they didn't bung up the rest of the circuit. You can also see why these things fail. The sharp metal of the can had just about chewed through the insulation  on one of the wires and you can just about see there's a patch missing on the white one that could short to the case. The solder work wasn't too bad. If yours is working I wouldn't worry about this part of it.

On to the more real and 'fixable by normal humans' part of the problem:

To make things clearer I removed the pickup strip completely. You may be able to just pull it up gently and move it over a bit. Here's what you're likely to find under it. The biggest issue was the screws, that are not only too large, they're not put in straight so the sharp edges dig into the pickup strip. If you remove the screws one of the causes of bad sound will be gone. I also cleaned up the plastic flash you can see sticking up and some that was sticling in from the end and sort of 'buzzing' on the bridge foot. I also cleaned up a bit of plastic that was sticking out the bottom so it would lay flat on the violin's body. 

Here you can see the partially completed base and the back of the pickup showing where the screws were digging in. If you had the smaller black screws that didn't do this then you may not have to do this part.  Note that I overdid it by removing so much from the ends. You shouldn't have to do that. When done I reattached the base to the violin top with some thin permanent photo mounting tape. You don't HAVE to tape it down but it removes some risk to the pickup wires should the base move. You may find that the base came attached at a less than ideal angle (those darn screws again) and a bit of measurement or trial-and-error are required to get it right.
Wait, you're not done. There's still the bridge and a few other issues...

The Bridge comes pre-curved on the bottom to fit a 'normal' violin. "But hey, this is a flat top violin".  So the very ends of the feet are the only thing touching the pickup. "Maybe the designers intended it like that" ...Yeah, right.
I found a bit of MDF from a broken drawer that had a nice 90 neg. edge on it and used it to prop up the FLAT side of the  bridge while I sanded the bottom with some sandpaper taped to the top of the kitchen counter. I sanded off just enough so there was a largish flat on the bottom, but not so large as to push the pickup down into the screw holes. Note that the taper cuts had already been done to this bridge but I wasn't through cutting the top edge to shape. Obviously it's a good idea to get the feet taken care of before putting the finishing touches on the top edge.

In my case the bridge came too tall for a proper playing action. I recut the top a bit to make that work out. Since I bought a five string, I also pushed up the curve a little in the middle and spaced out the strings to about 11mm to cut down on the unintentional double-stops. Once I get a 90 deg. attachment for my Dremel I may go to work on 'voicing' the bridge a bit more.

There were a few other things to do. A little sanding and peg dope to get the pegs working better. Install fine-tuners in the tailpiece and of course THROW AWAY the strings that came with it. The replacement Helicore medium set was $21 from gostrings.com and the Helicore heavy 'short' Viola C string was around an additional $10 (get the 'heavy' one or the tension may be too low). IfshinViolins.com also has great deals.

It plays nicely now and doesn't sound half bad, better I think than my friend's $600 Yamaha SV120, though his built in reverb covers up some of the difference. I carry around a business card with a notch cut out of it that I can slip in to see if the flat side of the bridge is exactly 90 deg. from the top of the violin (Important!).  You'll find the sound gets *really* oinky if the bridge isn't straight up or is touching the edges of the mounting plate.

You might be thinking:  "That's all too much work!"  Well, it's actually not much more setup work than is required on most of the violins I've seen at five times the price.
It's your money. You decide. See page two about screws and pickup placement details.

Continues on Page 2