Violin construction and mechanics

A violin consists of a body or corpus, a neck, a finger board, a bridge, a soundpost, four strings, and various fittings.

The body of the violin is made of two arched plates fastened to a "garland" of ribs with animal hide glue.

Parts attached with hide glue can be separated when needed by using heat and moisture or careful prying with a thin knife blade.

Typically the top (also known as the belly or table, in the U.K.) -- the soundboard) is made of quarter-sawn Norway spruce, bookmatched at a strongly glued joint down the center, with two soundholes (or "f-holes", from their resemblance to a stylized letter "f") precisely placed between the C-bouts and lower corners.

Ideally the top is glued to the ribs and linings with slightly diluted hide glue to allow future removal with minimal damage.

Occasionally a half-circle of ebony surrounds the button, either to restore material lost in resetting the neck of an old instrument, or to imitate that effect.

The linings also provide additional gluing surface for the seams between the plates (top and bottom) and the rib edges.

At the peg end of the fingerboard sits a small ebony or ivory nut, infrequently called the upper saddle, with grooves to position the strings as they lead into the pegbox.

The maple neck alone is not strong enough to support the tension of the strings without distorting, relying for that strength on its lamination with the fingerboard.

The bridge is a precisely cut piece of maple, preferably with prominent medullary rays, showing a flecked figure.

The mass distribution and flex of the bridge, acting as a mechanical acoustic filter, have a prominent effect on the sound.

It helps support the top under string pressure and has a variable effect on the instrument's tone, depending on its position and the tension of its fit.

While the shape and mass of the bass bar affect tone, it is fixed in position and not so adjustable as the sound post.

On many German trade instruments it used to be common fashion not to fit a bass bar but to leave a section of the front uncarved and shape that to resemble one.

The tailpiece may be wood, metal, carbon fiber, or plastic, and anchors the strings to the lower bout of the violin by means of the tailgut, nowadays most often a loop of stout nylon monofilament that rides over the saddle (a block of ebony set into the edge of the top) and goes around the endpin.

Attempts have been made to market violins with machine tuners, but they have not been generally adopted primarily because earlier designs required irreversible physical modification of the pegbox, making violinists reluctant to fit them to classical instruments, and they added weight at the scroll.

The bow consists of a stick with a ribbon of horsehair strung between the tip and frog (or nut, or heel) at opposite ends.

A flat slide usually made of ebony and shell covers the mortise where the hair is held by its wedge.

The stick was traditionally made of pernambuco - the heartwood of the brazilwood tree - but due to overharvesting and near extinction at its original source, other woods and materials, such as ironwood or graphite, are more commonly used.

The bridge helps to hold the strings in place, while the pegs maintain the tension necessary to produce vibration.

Heavier plain-gut strings at a suitable tension are inconvenient to play and difficult to fit into the pegbox.

In fact for those who have experience with them, plain gut strings are quite stable from a tuning standpoint[citation needed].

Some players use olive oil on gut strings to extend their playing life and improve tuning stability by reducing their sensitivity to humidity.

Gut strings tend to hold their sound quality nicely right up until they fail or become excessively worn[citation needed].

With low-density cores such as gut or synthetic fiber, the winding allows a string to be thin enough to play, while sounding the desired pitch at an appropriate tension.

The uppermost E string is usually solid steel, either plain or wound with aluminium in an effort to prevent "whistling."

Certain styles of music have come to be played with certain types of strings, yet there is no hard and fast rule in this respect as each musician is looking for his or her sound.

It has been known for a long time that the shape, or arching, as well as the thickness of the wood and its physical qualities govern the sound of a violin.

A scientific explanation includes a discussion of how the properties of the wood determine where the nodes occur, whether the plates move with end or diagonally opposite points rising together or in various mixed modes.