As a musician, I have experienced the joy of teaching.  Sometimes in a lesson I will immediately know what needs the most attention and sometimes I hear or see something that I have to figure out how to go about fixing for the student.  Some techniques or phrases that I say work better for some students and have no affect on others.  This is what really excites me as a teacher because I have to teach myself the best way to express a musical or technical idea to someone else.  In a similar light, I have two teachers for my violin making experience.  Mr. Vartanian has been building for decades and Mr. Belote has been learning from him for only a few years.  Both express the same ideas, just differently and sometimes, one will word something or show me something in a way that I learn it better.

(Reminds me of when I was figuring out how to hold a bow).  There are ways to look at and/or feel how something is cutting but if you’re not careful, too much can be taken off.  I now feel much more comfortable and a lot more control using a knife after what they showed me about the blade and what to more conscious of during the process. To fix the chunk I took out, Mr. Vartanian needed to see how much was really affected so I used a plane to graduate the area around the f-holes down about a millimeter.  Upon doing this the lines that Mr. Vartanian looks for become clearer and a few small cuts reduced the damage I caused but over all, it is a part of the f-hole now.  From the picture you can see this only affects the inside of the violin but to a maker as meticulous as Mr. Vartanian, the inside of the instrument should be as beautiful as the outside.

Once these fixes were in place and a few more adjusting cuts were taken, the shape of the f-holes was done!  Honestly, after slipping with the knife and really taking away too much is some spots I’m not as happy with the look.  I compare the process of me learning how to cut the f-holes to purchasing a car.  When my parents were in the market for a new car while I was growing up, my whole family started taking notice to what was on the road and what peopled seemed to like and not like.  Even though we see cars everyday we didn’t take as much notice to them till we were looking for one.  As the f-holes took their shape, I took notice to various f-holes and what I liked and didn’t like about them.  Learning what to look for in terms of lines I finally stepped back and looked at the f-holes I traced, messed up, fixed and ended up with.  While I like them compared to some and they will do just fine, I’m not very fond of the shape.  Other people have seen the top and like the look but on my next violin I think I will have a better understanding what I’m going for and have more success achieving it.

Completing the look of the f-holes involves putting little notches in the side.  They are on a horizontal center line that measures a certain distance from the top edge of the plate.  These notches add both character to the f-hole and tell a maker the distance the bridge should be from the fingerboard assuming all goes smoothly.  While it can’t always be trusted that the notches are in the right spot they are the guideline for placement of the bridge later on.