Better than Ebony

I found a replacement material for Ebony! It is densified and coloured beach wood called SonoWood black.

The quality of the ebony we can buy today is not satisfying when comparing it to the much denser stuff where you hardly see any pores as we find it on some of the fine French instruments and bows from the 19th century. For sound reasons, I left my fingerboards with the modern ebony very thick because I found that a violin with a light fingerboard can lack in substance of sound. That works, but then the maple part of the neck becomes quite thin and that is not ideal for the long term health of the violin, since the neck wears off with playing and will need replacement sooner. Also, the grooves of the top nut need cleaning out with a needle file frequently, when the top nut material is not wear resistant enough. We have a few pieces we reclaimed from old fingerboards for that, but they are always in short supply.

Fingerboard and top nut in SonoWood Black

With the new SonoWood black, I can achieve excellent acoustic results with a fingerboard thickness of 4.8mm on the sides, which leaves the neck with much healthier proportions. It will still way about 10 grams more than my ebony fingerboards but it just works so well.

In 2010, my former employer Mark Wilhelm, started to look for alternatives when he heard a report by a team of the the Zürich Zoo who filmed how some of the Ebony was looted from the Masuala Natural Reserve in Macassar. Together with some researchers of the ETH Zürich they began to develop alternatives: Musikinstrumente aus bedrohtem Holz - SRF

In 2018 a first non tropical material that worked really well was ready: densified spruce. Wilhelm Geigenbau hosted a research conference where we compared all available materials. ( link to my blog post 2018) I reported on it on this blog in 2018. I really liked the properties of the densified spruce but it’s light colour did not work with my aesthetics. “Beauty in light and shadow” - I need every bit of darkness I can get to let the wood glow!

One of my violins with a densified spruce fingerboard - Suhr 2018

In the meantime, the ETH team have founded a spin of and are producing various items out of densified spruce ranging from credit cards to satellite components - the material is wood, 100% decomposable. And, finally, have also found a way to colour it black enough for my violins. They are still tinkering with different colouration processes, but I had two batches that are looking and working great!

It is a little harder to work, but it will polish up extremely well. On the upside, the playing surface is routed to finished shape, it only needs sanding.