Electric Violins

Picture! and another picture!

I’ve been building my own electric violin for the last few weeks. I designed the entire thing myself, used the CNC router at work to cut out the main body pieces, and just recently I was able to string it up for a test play. Go check out the Images page for more pictures.

Spec wise it is a 15″ long body, so technically a viola. I designed it for 5 strings, C G D A E. All the strings are steel cored strings, for use with my electro-magnetic pickups. I’ve been wanting a 5 string violin for a long time, and building my own is significantly cheaper than buying one.

In addition to building my own custom body, I’m working on winding my own electro-magnetic pickups for the violin. This is fairly tricky, because I have to shape the magnetic piece in the center to match the different heights of the string along the bridge, so that each string outputs the correct volume. Once I get some pickups wound, I’ll post a whole new batch of pictures and some videos demoing the sound.

I also still need to paint the violin. I’m going to order some transparent red stain and aerosol lacquers soon.