Custom Electric Violin

At times, we get to turn our hand to working with instruments other than guitars. We were asked to make an electric violin which incorporated a Z shape in its form. Our solution here is made from a solid piece of Maple wood finished with a water based Candy Apple Red, Macassar Ebony chinrest, Shoulder Pad & Fingerboard. You'll notice some significant differences between our design & that of a classical violin. It incorporates an LR Baggs VIO Bridge pickup to sense the string vibration and Gotoh Guitar Tuners. Yes - the tuners are at the bottom end of the violin not the head of the neck.

Electric Violin Design

Like many of our guitar designs, we modelled this instrument using 3D computer aided design before cutting and building. The computer does not make all of the design decisions for us - It is a tool that allows us to visualize & test our ideas.

First we create the most critical elements of the design such as the strings, bridge and their relative positions, then develop the rest of our ideas around those critical elements. The violin was created around the position of the bridge & both the angle and scale of the strings.

Electric Violin Pickup

The string vibrations are sensed by a small piezo pickup which is bonded to the Maple Aubert Violin Bridge. The pickup is made by LR Baggs and may be purchase with or without a carpenter jack which allows easy retrofit to a normal violin by mounting the jack to the side of the violin body. We adapted this pickup for our custom electric violin design. The black color is a conductive coating which helps reduce the pickup of noise as well as matching the color to the overall syle of the violin.

See our Violin Pickups page for more information.

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