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An open source 3D printable acoustic violin
- yummybear 11y agoIs it just me or does it not sound very good? Kind of tinny and not clear and bright? It might just be me. Nice technical achievement though.
- catshirt 11y agocmon now edit: now that i see the price... yeah you could say it sounds a little tinny
- Symbiote 11y agoHow does it compare to a cheap $125 violin from Amazon?
- petewailes 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFaCpYRMKB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFaCpYRMKB8 Short version - not great. Plastic just doesn't make for a very musical sound. If you want an explanation of why, I can go into the physics behind that. Source: musician of 25ish years.
- louhike 11y agoI suspect it is hard to achieve the acoustics of an instrument traditionnaly made of wood with plastic. Thinking of it, I don't remember hearing an instrument made out of plastic which sounded nice even though I'm a musician. I'm not saying it cannot be done, it is just not common for now.
- Olap84 11y agoA kazoo comes pretty close
- Symbiote 11y agoCould it be too expensive? A good, precise injection mould is many tens of thousands of dollars, and several are probably needed. That's a lot of upfront cost for a low volume product.
- s_kilk 11y agoNah, it's just physics really. If you're making an instrument that's traditionally made of wood, and the sound of wood is your cultural reference point, then the plastic/<$SYNTHETIC_MATERIAL> version is not going to sound as good. It may even sound fine in it's own right, out of context, but it'll almost never be 'the same' as wood. I think that's really the heart of the issue. EDIT: actually, on the expense issue, these days manufacturing of musical instruments has gotten so good (especially in the east), that the cost of making a 'good' instrument has fallen through the floor. Today we can get perfectly usable (or even very nice) instruments at prices that would make musicians of yesteryear weep.
- piceas 11y agoPrhaps the alto recorder.
- Geee 11y agoI guess those new plastic trombones and trumpets are pretty good.
- stan_rogers 11y agoDepends how you define "plastic". There are a number of really nice carbon fibre fiddles in the "serious" price range that may give up a teeny-tiny fraction of the absolute best that can be achieved with the best woods, the best varnishes, the best luthiers, the best alignment of the stars and the correct sequence of profanities and vulgarities uttered during the production process, but for that minor loss you get excellent instrument-to-instrument consistency and the ability to play with the same sound under wildly varying conditions of temperature and humidity. Part of the problem with acceptance is that once the price gets high enough, people want "a real one", and Cremona never smelled much like carbon fibre. Boosey & Hawkes used to make a wonderful series of woodwinds (clarinets and oboes) in aligned glass-fibre-reinforced resin with the same sort of advantages - and disadvantages - with one extra little niggle: they weighed a bloody ton. (I owned a B&H clarinet I haven't picked up in a little over 20 years. There's still a discernible dent in my right thumb, something one never got in a persistent way from wood or the student-oriented plastic or Bakelite instruments. Much nicer sound than anything of wood at twice the price, but I can understand why they didn't sell too very many of them.) I'm sure they could do much better now, at a cost - but then there's the acceptance factor to deal with. At least ebony has problems associated with it that spruce and maple don't so far; it will probably be easier to accept good synthetics over bad or hyper-expensive wood before too much time goes by.
- sanoli 11y agoThose ovation acoustic guitars with the plastic bottoms and carbon fiber tops are pretty good.
- davidgerard 11y agoOvation guitars are ridiculously desirable items amongst musicians I know. At first glance I thought you were saying Ovation made violins and I was going HOLY CRAP WANT :-)
- programLyrique 11y agoThe material used to build an instrument is not very important for the sound, at least for wind instruments. See http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0708/roncone-0708.html http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0708/roncone-0708.html for instance. Some professional French horn players playing with a mouthpiece on a garden hose : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOpWKgLzxQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOpWKgLzxQ4
- gglitch 11y agoJack White famously plays/played a plastic guitar, and got, in my opinion, pretty excellent tones out of it, but (a) you're asking about "acoustics," which don't apply in the same way with an electric guitar, and (b) his tone is/was produced almost entirely by his amps and pedals.
- ATsch 11y agoThe only professionaly used plastic instruments I have seen are recorders and flutes. Although no serious recorder/flute player would prefer their sound they can be quite good, especially because they are tuned higher than normal recorders which are tuned way to low. (This is why they sound so bad when playing with other instruments.) I habe also seen tubists use acrylic mouthpieces.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoIt's not just you. No orchestral professional is going to want this over a wooden instrument. And given that, the pricing is just silly. It's a good example of bad (naive) modelling. There's a lot more to making a violin (guitar/lute/anything...) than cutting out parts with the right shape and hammering them together. Choice of wood, glue/joint mechanics, and thickness/composition of the varnish are at least as important.
- apendleton 11y agoThe fingerboard looks much shorter than on a standard violin. Maybe the materials can't support being cantilevered out over the body like a regular wooden fingerboard? If so, bummer... seems like it would have a pretty adverse effect on range, fingering options, etc.
- mattsouth 11y agoIs it just that the head is smaller than a typical wooden violin (no scroll etc)?
- apendleton 11y agoNo, it looks shorter in the other direction (doesn't extend as far over the body). So the string lengths are the same, I think. You just can't finger as high.
- leni536 11y agoI can't help it: https://www.xkcd.com/743/ https://www.xkcd.com/743/
- netcan 11y agoThat's one of the most unbelievable XKCD references ever.
- AlphaWeaver 11y agoYou beat me to it...
- ant6n 11y agoGolden, especially with the .stl discussion in this thread.
- jeremiecoullon 11y agoI went on the comment section purely to see if someone had posted this. Nice one.
- cperciva 11y agoFrom the FAQ: You may use the hovalin for commercial purposes if you agree to send 10% of your gross revenue from use of the design to HOVA LLC every six months. It may be open source, but it's not open source as I've ever encountered it before. (Also, I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that copyright law allows them to demand royalties on the use of a musical instrument. Is a musical performance a derivative work of the instrument design?)
- marcosscriven 11y agoI couldn't find the source - only the .stl files There's a repo on GitHub, but it looks old https://github.com/matthova/hovalin https://github.com/matthova/hovalin
- naz 11y agoI think that's referring revenue from printing and selling your own copies of the completed violin, rather than from musical performance.
- vollmond 11y agoThough you'd think it would be worded more like "you may use the Hovalin design files for commercial purposes...."
- jononor 11y agoRequested them to release the sources, not just the .STL. Releasing just .STLs is more akin to freeware than open source, as the sources are the project files uses to produce the .STL (which is similar to a compiled binary).
- pmelendez 11y agoI don't quite understand that analogy. In other to while trying to understand the assembly code that was generated. STL, on the other hand, is a text file that can be imported for most 3D design tools and hence you can modify it.
- eric-hu 11y agoPretty cool achievement. The prices ($300, $450, $600) for the different kinds of kits make this seem like a poor investment if one is just looking for a violin.
- mentos 11y agoTo me the idea of printing my own violin would be to get a cheap yet decently functional Violin. The price point of $70 is 2x what it needs to be in my opinion. Going on ebay there are entry level violins for $40. Would be cool to see an open source piano