My RESPONSE to TWO SET VIOLIN | More DARK SECRETS of the VIOLIN INDUSTRY

hi and welcome back to my workshop this is lucas a violin maker in gremoda and today i'm going to be making a video quite different to the one that i was planning on uploading initially as i'm going to be responding to one of the latest videos made by twoset violin first of all for those who don't know who to set violin is let me tell you that you've been living on a youtube bubble because you have them and me anyhow let me tell you that there are a couple of musicians who also make comedy sketches reaction videos and create a lot of different content related to the classical music environment so make sure to go and subscribe to the channel they recently made this video called the exposing dark secrets of the violin industry and being a part of it myself and knowing some of the things that happen in this world i can't say loud enough how happy i am that they decided to make this video and i think it's about time we start addressing some of the issues that go on with it now i'm going to make myself some tea and i'm going to be commenting on the video and adding some of my own personal experiences and views to it so let's get into it we were recently chatting to a few friends of ours that work in the business of selling musical instruments they told us a lot of stories they have experienced themselves and also that they've heard behind the scenes initially it was like a shock to us but then after some careful reflection we kind of mapped it back to our own experiences and realized that we ourselves have been kind of subject to similar kind of experiences and so what we're talking about today is some of the unethical practices that happen in selling musical instruments so yeah we already know this is going to be interesting we're going to basically cover two main points the first one is about what we only recently discovered to be a very widespread international phenomenon of a secret commission system and the second part of the video we're going to talk about is selling fake instruments yeah all right so commissions it's kind of hard when doing research about this to find statistical evidence because so much of this is underground and just hearing stories but we did find yeah it's quite impossible actually just to find any information about it teachers operate from a kind of commission system where when the student buys an instrument the teacher secretly takes a cut note the words secretly as well a lot of the time i love how he and pathetic work secretly so i'm actually stopping the video to do the exact same thing this is kind of an unspoken rule and this results seem very questionable behavior right so these friends of ours that we were talking to mentioned that sometimes a kid would buy an instrument from the shop and then a few days later they'll just get a phone call from a teacher they'll be like all right so i heard that my student bought a violin from your place uh you know what to do right and like already to me fortunately that really never happened to me at least not the exact same way where after a sale i got contacted by a teacher asking for a commission but that might only be because i'm a violin maker and not a shop so the way that clients approach me is slightly different but what did happen to me is that i got asked for commissions before a sale or in some cases teachers contacted me pretending to be interested in my instruments for themselves and then they admitted that they just wanted to make the contact and ask me if i was willing to give to give them her 20 or 50 commission if they send me a student or else if they found me a client yeah i was so shocked to hear this there's one thing when it's like an agreed-upon commission system right like an affiliate marketing link thing but the shop owners themselves don't even agree to this commission system and then they have to cough up commission based off an expectation you know sometimes they try to be like no we just sold our instrument but a lot of the times these teachers have such authority and power in the look yeah i've been told that in some places if you don't buy the instrument that the teacher tells you to buy they might try to make everything so that they stopped you to get higher in your career maybe if you want to get into some particular music school or college they will kind of speak badly about you call musical community they kind of use their influence as a threatening mechanism so they might kind of insinuate if you don't give me a commission i'm going to spread to all my students not to buy instruments from your place and then their teachers probably have connections to other teachers yes so it's like your deal has been cut off from that single t-shirt for all the students because you wouldn't agree to pay a commission that wasn't even agreed on in the first place yeah another example where this would often go wrong is for example the teacher initially recommended the student to buy from shop hey but the student themselves decided i don't like this violin they come to shop b and buy an instrument from shot b the teacher will still call shot b and ask for the commission even though like the whole idea yeah so that's why they sometimes contact different shops or different makers so that they can offer the students a wider range and they seem a bit more legit but they're still getting the commission anyways to be fair it's still more legit than just showing them one possibility the other connection is typically i helped you get the sales so you get a commission you can't trust the teacher to really genuinely care about you as a student or if it's your kids that are learning if they're going to get a good instrument or not back in the day students i really trusted my teacher 100 and i think that's such an important dynamic to have when the student trusts that the teacher has it best their best interest in mind but unfortunately they're definitely cases where a teacher might be driven out of greed to sell crappy instruments or to recommend a much more expensive overpriced violin and they're definitely stories that we've heard of teachers asking violin dealers and shop sellers to mark up by a hundred percent just to get that bigger commission one of my very yes i've had kind of this situation happening to me as well where a teacher would contact me and say like look if this student which is called whatever contacts you please tell them that i'm telling that your price is different to the one that you told me because that way i can make a profit i recently wrote an article for a shop in london on how to choose an instrument i'm going to link it in the description i think it can be very useful for some things and i was going to try to do right there something like do not trust your teacher but to be fair i think that's also not the truth because i've also met some really really good teachers who maybe after a couple of minutes trying my instrument they said like no this is much better than what i have to offer you or they were really genuine about it first teachers in taiwan definitely scared me um we found out later that we paid way too much for violin that doesn't sound like it's meant to even sound good yeah i think we probably paid 10x the price oh my god the parents just want the best for the kid and then for the teacher to know that they have this power to really kind of push it that way it's like what what are you trying to achieve besides more money when it comes to buying money instruments please try to get second and third opinions go to someone the teacher has no association with yes and say hey what do you think of this instrument what do you think of this bow the problem with that though is that the person you're going to ask might also have its own interest so it could happen that for example you take a vial into a shop and you ask whether it's good or not and they might say that it's bad only because they want to try and sell one of their own it's kind of like the google reviews thing that for example i got a negative fake review i think one month ago from a musician in theory that never contacted me and wrote a review during the most extreme lockdown so obviously didn't visit my workshop and i also saw that this person musician in theory wrote different negative reviews to some of the most famous violin makers in the city so it could happen that they just want to talk badly just to damage the reputation of the other person as well that being said i still think it's a good idea to try and get different opinions like honestly speaking it's so hard to know what a good instrument is i'd say even now after like 22 years of playing experience it's still not easy i still can't tell sometimes as soon as i need to check i need to ask around i need to go hey is this the actual price yeah how does that sound actually a six seven year old starting and their parent the parent that doesn't even plan us from it they're not going to know and they're probably too busy teachers people will be abusing this there's just so many other ridiculous stories about it for example there was a case where a student bought from the shop but that student has two teachers and both teachers called to demand for a commission and so now the shops like they're being forced to jack up their prices to anticipate commissions that they don't even want to right they're kind of under the mercy of the recommendations on one eagle now this is true and it works at very different levels for example most of my sales nowadays are commissions which i get because of word of mouth which i really believe is the best marketing you can get but at the same time it's the most difficult one because you might get some people recommending certain instruments because of personal interest instead of really recommending it because they really believe on the instrument or they believe on the makeup as i said before as well it means that it's very difficult for makers to enter into new markets what do i do do i say no to everything i lose all my business to a competitor that's next door she'll pay all the commissions you know i think we're gonna agree the problem here is there's a betrayal trust between the teacher and the student and there's a kind of power dynamic that happens between influential teachers and small business owners one of the more common solutions that we've heard of and again i don't know if this is possible but it's that if our ecosystem is gonna depend on referrals and teachers are going to want to make a little bit of money perhaps the best thing to do is to make the sole process transparent and to make it that would be very very good the only problem is why would they do it i mean it would be like giving up some of the power yeah none of this 100 markup thing yeah it's so much better to tell you hey just so you know i would recommend this guy but also get a commission from it yeah there's also teachers that sell instruments to the students directly and that's also good yeah that's also very this can really be one of the worst cases i've seen some instruments being sold by teachers at ridiculously high prices and it really puts the student in a very difficult position but you know to be honest we didn't really think much we never did it we've never been i never existed it didn't even occur to me it occurred to me yeah i just wanted to make sure the student got a good freaking read here so you can come back and not play like shh no i'm just joking it's funny because when we initially said like nah this doesn't really happen where we grew up and they're like no it happens you probably just don't know about it yeah we really never want to believe that we're wrong and it's as it's usually said it's easier to trick someone than to make the person realize that it has been tricked the second part we want to talk about is fake instruments everyone knows it's everywhere but everyone's just going along with it yeah tell them about how your label got shipped off in your violinist oh yeah so okay look i still like my instrument um it's been with me for like 12 years before i changed the new world the maker is called renato scrollabeza but the r was cut off so also who's this kanato scroll of japanese italian guy making my stress so dodgy but i never went further than that because i was like 14 or 15 had other problems in my life right then one day on after the tour 2017 i met the maker i actually met the maker's daughter first and mayor's daughter looked at her she said it might be his all of his instruments apparently there's a nickname for the instrument yeah but mine didn't have a nickname on the top of the label someone cut it off and put that label on a different instrument somewhere so that label is currently on an instrument somewhere around the world someone probably thinks it's a legit school of answer and i was like oh my god she goes and i'm also not sure if this date is the correct date but she took it to him anyway we verified that it was his he started crying it's like a little baby she thinks it's called the scarletti it's named after the composer scarletti but she goes yeah someone cut it off the case in hand is like so easy to fake an instrument another stop yes especially for modern instruments that for the untrained eye can look very very similar between themselves what they might do is to put the label of a very expensive violin maker into the one of a cheaper one or even into factory-made instruments that can cost 300 euros i've seen this before where a client doesn't find out for many many years until he decides to message the maker to ask if that instrument was made by this person and they make a response that it hasn't so my advice for this would be try to message the maker before buying an instrument and not afterwards sorry on that topic our friends in the balance shop right someone came in with a violin to repair there was a label of some maker the label made it was like as if they paid five figures for the instrument but then the shop owners was like that's our phone someone bought our violin stuck a label on it and sold it with an insane markup doesn't help that people have become very good at making fake there's a story another very well known thing for modern instruments is that some makers don't make their own instruments themselves if not that they might make someone else do them or else they might get some factory-made instruments revarnish them and make a new setup now this is usually quite easy to spot because for example i can only make around five or six instruments a year now let's imagine that i'm very very slow and that i could double it which i really don't think it's the case because i even work on weekends and don't really take holidays but as i said let's put let's imagine that's that scenario um so if if you're going to a maker and you see that it has 30 instruments to offer then that's a bit suspicious that vyon once pranked paganini by making a lookalike copy of his cuaneri paganini himself apparently couldn't tell the difference when looking at it his own violin so you can imagine how good these fakes are and also they go further they even fake the age make it look older and even change the path slightly to deceive the buyer so don't be fooled by that i'm sure you can go to shop now and see an instrument that looks kind of old but it's actually made in 2020 yeah dating itself could be a problem dumb analysis to see how old the violin is but they will already make he was talking about other type of dating 1 in 700 800 made of violent at the same time yeah you can't tell by the day by the day actually unrelated story but this is something to keep in mind as well some modern violin makers make their violence with thin wood thinner wood means the violin will sound better in the short term but it ages badly violent with thicker wood they need more playing and time to mature yes so that's something else okay that's kind of subjective and this is coming from someone who doesn't make finn instruments as i tend to agree with him and i think that the thicker ones tend to age better and they have a certain richness of the tone which i really really like but that being said it will also depend on some of the characteristics such as the density of the wood the type of grain or even the type of arching to be able and the thicker was it doesn't mean it's always good it just means there's better potential like your old one was also thin right yeah my my old violin the sound just it went really down yeah it was an old one the typical old violence story so just i mean i don't know you guys got to be careful you know yeah really so one of the things that might happen for example is that these old instruments get a set up that will make them sound very well at the beginning it will seem that they are very potent very rich but uh it will be kind of overpushing the instrument and this setup will wear off very quickly and then the sound of the instrument will go downhill certifiers themselves may have questionable yeah it's just it doesn't mean it's certified it means it's a legitimate issue now these four modern instruments is slightly uh let's say more convenient because for example i keep a digital copy of all my certificates of the instruments of my instruments that left the workshop so if someone message me and says is this your certificate or is this your instrument i can always check that and confirm but unfortunately yes with other instruments i know of some cases of people certifying things which are not from are they getting secret commissions yeah we won't go into much detail but there's another link below if you want to find out about satori fake satori bow satori is kind of like a premium bow as well also very how much they go for satori bows are like 30 000 yeah i wouldn't mind a satori boat but it's just a stick of wood yeah just a stick of wood i'm sure my bow maker would be very very angry about this quote uh considering all the work that's behind them such as the curve the shape the weight the weight distribution the quality of the materials but i really understand what what he meant about that so so that's okay you can see how whoa now we're talking about faking it we have a friend she's definitely not someone that can just cough up money to buy a half a million dollar violin by the way in the violin world the price has been jacked up so much to the point where a lot of the value of good instruments are no longer just about how they sound but there's the history and art behind it and so she almost got tricked into buying a scarring palette so this is also quite a good bar probably going for a hundred thousand yeah you know she was considering buying it got a lot of different opinions a few experts said it's a fake so it's not even in a financial position where she can be i think she was considered getting it she's gonna say i wouldn't well in that case my advice would will always be don't buy something you can't really afford and this is not just related to to classical instruments or bows or whatever of course in this case i assume that the price is more about the historical thing as well rather than than the quality of the instrument itself maybe and another story i just remembered remember how your bow got swapped out yeah so this is one of those moments in the moment when we thought about it i think it happened to me long story short can you imagine like a fourth innocent thirteen fourteen year old i wouldn't dare to challenge an adult so i got my vocal read here picked it up again this is so crazy i picked up the burnout thinking hey this is not my boat innocently i go hey i don't think this is my boat but the bow guy i was like no it is your boat it ended at that i didn't question it because there's an adult as a student that is so true and such a sad story but it's so true when you're okay you just blindly believe on what the adult says no look this is definitely one of the biggest and most frustrating problems in the music industry especially for violence the value of a violin often comes from investment purposes you know investors literally buy violence they're not even musicians and some investors don't even care if it's a good violent or not as long as everyone thinks it's a legitimate instrument and because of that wealthy people have driven up the cost of violence the story is that modern day makers are not able to find the formula of the great classics at strativara so therefore they're limited i think this he just said basically sums up the whole video right away because as many of the other things were built up i believe that this one is two of course i might be a bit biased here because i'm a model maker but i know that nowadays makers use better techniques the older the modern knowledge they can be more precise than the older ones and there's no such thing as a secret varnish or a secret anything about the olden instruments and don't get me wrong i'm not talking about bad about them i think that what they did was amazing and i'm not trying to diminish any of the work my workshop is only 100 meters away from stradivali's house and i'm honored about that but what i'm trying to say is that i think that keeping this narrative that those instruments are so magical it's also what keeps their prices so high and therefore they keep going up in price it's a big problem it's one of the reasons that we went for modern makers as well a lot of decent sounding violence with proper historical names would just be in the six figures i love to play one but it is too much even for us right it's just too much money and also you have to go for the whole household checking it's authenticity you get three experts they could have different opinions what are you gonna do so that's why we kind of went for a new instrument the makers are live the maker can look at it and go yes this is my instrument it just makes it easier that's fine i always say the same thing i think that you get an old instrument that is of the same quality or superior than a modern one you have to go to the sixth digits and by that point of course that you're also getting a historical piece that has been most likely properly fixed maybe the origins were redone most likely the interior has been pre-built which means that they glue a new piece of wood and then they remade the thicknesses now this is kind of cool because you get kind of a mix between an older instrument and a modern one my advice though i want to share is that if you're a student see if you can find a way to get loaned a great instrument i know a lot of music schools these days have some system if not my personal approach to it is you can never truly be sure about the investment side of the value so i try to focus on just paying for an instrument that at least the sound and practical value makes sense to me yes even if today i found out it was a fake how good it sounds makes me feel okay with the price i paid for yes sound how easy it was played quality of it right i think that's great advice and another thing i would add if possible and i know it's not easy is to learn some things about violin making this could help you know how to spot a good quality instrument from one that is not construction wise of course and then to learn how to analyze the sound as well some characteristics of it rather than just saying i like this instrument or i don't and there's more about this in this article that i mentioned before which i'm going to be linking on the description another thing i would obviously look for is transparency both on a violin maker or a shop and of course this is not something easy to spot for example one of the reasons why i do youtube is well first of all because i love the community and i'm always watching youtube while working so i always have the feeling that i need to to give something back but also because well it's free marketing but i think uh as i'm always showing all the instruments that i make or at least most of the instruments that i make and i'm showing the construction process clients that commission an instrument for me can see that it's actually me the one who's building it that it's uh that it's me working on all the steps and i think that makes them feel a bit more secure i could probably talk more on why i prefer modern instruments to all the ones but i don't really think it's related to the topic and i don't want to make this video too long so please let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in something like this so that's it for today thank you so much for watching don't forget to like and share the video if you enjoyed it do subscribe to the channel for more content like this and until the next time

Channel: Lucas Fabro | Fabroviolins

Views: 25,611

Keywords: violin, viola, cello, violino, violoncello, music, musica, musique, geige, skrzypce, orchestra, orquesta, classic, clasica, sonido, sound, concierto, concert, workshop, handmade, artisan, artist, oneminutelutherie, luthier, liutaio, violinmaker, violin maker, laudero, cremona, italia, italy, baroque, barroco, arte, art, stradivari, stradivarius, guarneri, amati, ruggeri, ornati, violinist, violist, cellist, strings, musician, instruments, classicalmusic, 小提琴, 바이올린, バイオリン, #twosetviolin

Id: tpwTnl0PbGw

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/justauntie]

Interesting to hear from your viewpoint, thanks!