OFFICINA SERAFIN

Touch a sounding string lightly — don’t press it to the fingerboard — and you force a point of stillness. Every motion that cannot hold still at that point dies. What survives is a harmonic: higher, purer, faintly unearthly. Violinists call these notes flautati — flute notes. The string below is live: pluck it open, then set a finger at the half, the third, the quarter.

A violin is nine months of decisions you cannot take back. I keep the diary on the bench, in pencil, with the hygrometer’s word first — hide glue and dry air conspire against joints, so humidity is a tool like any other. Opus 74, begun in September, strung in June.

1. 12 Sept61% RH

   Chose the wood by tapping every billet on the attic stairs. The 2011 spruce — split face like combed silk. Joined the two halves of the top before lunch: hide glue, rubbed joint, no clamps. An honest joint closes with a squeak.

2. 30 Sept58% RH

   Ribs bent on the hot iron. Maple resists for a second, then gives all at once — you learn to hear the fibres relax. Both C-bouts before the iron cooled.

3. 18 Oct55% RH

   Outline traced from my del Gesù mould — the one with the corner I never corrected. The asymmetry is the signature. Willow blocks in, corners left proud.

4. 7 Nov47% RH

   Arching begun: gouge, then thumb planes down to the no. 2. This is the fortnight that decides everything. A violin is its arching; the rest is furniture.

5. 26 Nov41% RH

   Cold snap. Humidifier on, gluing suspended three days. Carved arching by lamplight instead and sharpened everything twice.

6. 15 Dec39% RH

   Graduation. Top thicknessed to 2.7 mm in the centre, 2.4 at the flanks. Tap, flex, listen, scrape, again. Mid-afternoon the plate went from a knock to a ring — you never miss the moment.

7. 9 Jan38% RH

   F-holes cut. One knife-slip from ruin for forty minutes; I take no visitors in f-hole week. The tone moved the instant the second eye opened.

8. 2 Feb42% RH

   Bass bar chalk-fitted until the chalk had nothing left to say, then sprung in — a whisper of tension, two tenths proud at the ends.

9. 24 Feb44% RH

   Neck carved; the scroll took four days. Nobody hears a scroll, but everyone looks at it first. Flutes carried right through the throat, the way my maestro insisted.

10. 19 Mar49% RH

    Box closed, neck set: overstand 6.2 mm, projection 27 at the bridge. The white violin is complete. It already speaks — quietly, like someone about to be given a voice.

11. 8 Apr52% RH

    Ground coat rubbed to nothing, then the first amber. The white violin disappears. Grief and relief in equal parts.

12. 14 May54% RH

    Varnish, coat after coat: oil and resin, red over gold, sun-thickened on the sill. Twelve days between coats four and five because the weather refused to dry it. Patience is an ingredient.

13. 11 June57% RH

    Soundpost of split spruce, bridge cut over two evenings. Strung at noon; first open fifths at 12:20. Nine months, and already it asks questions I didn’t teach it. It goes to its first audition on Friday.

Each instrument leaves with its bench diary and a certificate. Trials at the workshop by appointment; I do not ship an instrument I have not heard played by its buyer.

Commissions open for 2027. One bench makes three instruments a year; the waiting list is honest — about eighteen months.

• Humidity

  Keep it between 45 and 55%. The violin was born at 50 and will always try to go home. A ten-euro hygrometer in the case outranks a thousand-euro case.

• After playing

  Wipe rosin from the strings and the top with a dry cloth kept only for this. Rosin is varnish’s slowest enemy.

• The bow

  Loosen the hair every time. A bow left tense overnight forgets its camber.

• The bridge

  Glance at it weekly from the side — the back face square to the top. Tuning pulls it forward a hair at a time until one evening, loudly, it goes over. Stand it up before it leans.

• Seasons

  Bring it to the bench at the turn of each season. The soundpost is a tenth of a millimetre from perfect in winter, and a different tenth in summer.

• Never

  Never polish it yourself, never leave it in a car, never lend it to the ambitious.