Scribd
Upload
125 views2 pages

DIY Electric Viola Crafting Guide

This document summarizes the construction of an electric viola. It describes how the body was carved from maple wood and attached to an ebony fingerboard. Standard viola parts like the bridge and chinrest were used. To reduce weight, guitar-style tuners were mounted on the underside rather than a peghead. A piezoelectric pickup transfers vibrations to an amplifier, allowing it to be played and amplified electronically.

Uploaded by

Neill Graham
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
125 views2 pages

DIY Electric Viola Crafting Guide

This document summarizes the construction of an electric viola. It describes how the body was carved from maple wood and attached to an ebony fingerboard. Standard viola parts like the bridge and chinrest were used. To reduce weight, guitar-style tuners were mounted on the underside rather than a peghead. A piezoelectric pickup transfers vibrations to an amplifier, allowing it to be played and amplified electronically.

Uploaded by

Neill Graham
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Electric Viola (1999)

Comments are disabled because I got tired of the endless spam. For
questions, comments, and/or dilemmas, email th@thallenbeck.com.

Before it was a viola, it was a plain maple board. Maple is a preferred


wood for solidbody instruments because it’s dense, close-grained, and
carves well, it holds up to changes in air pressure and humidity, it’s strong
and doesn’t warp, scratch, or split easily, and it transfers sound well, which
is good for instruments that require electronic pickups or transducers.

I carved the body from the maple board pictured above and attached it to a
separate curved piece at the bottom to support a chinrest and the transducer
jack. The fingerboard is made of ebony and was purchased at Ifshin
Violins in Berkeley, CA. I bought the fingerboard in a semi-finished state –
it was already shaped, but I smoothed it out with two steps of fine sandpaper and polished it with
#0000 steel wool.

The bridge is a standard viola bridge (the kind with adjustable feet, good for a flat surface), also
obtained at Ifshin.

To reduce the weight on the top end, I mounted the tuners – in this case Schaller Rotomatics –
on the bottom end rather than where the peghead should be. The strings are threaded through
small holes at the top of the neck and anchored to the underside with rubber washers.

I got the dimensions for this instrument from a 16-inch viola.


The black wire from the transducer jack to the bridge ends
in a folded copper tab that slides into the bridge slot; the tab
transfers vibration in the bridge to a piece of piezoelectric
material that converts this vibration into electricity, which is
in turn converted into sound by an amplifier. The transducer
is a Fishman violin pickup.

The chinrest came from Ifshin. I splurged for a nice wooden


one instead of a plastic one.

The tuners are mounted on the underside of the body


because that’s how you’d mount them on a guitar – notice
the absence of a standard tailpiece. Fine-tuning pegs are not
an issue here, because guitar tuners provide more precision
that standard tuning pegs do.

The tonguelike thing underneath the instrument is a shoulder rest shaped from maple and
attached to the underside of the body.

You might also like