i'd like to free up some horizontal space in my room, so i'm thinking of adding some walls hooks to hang instruments on (two fiddles, three bows, a mandolin and an acoustic guitar), instead of storing them in the case. is it safe to do this, or will changes in temperature or humidity possibly damage them?

Can you not put some shelves on the wall and use these to store your instruments in their cases? It might be safer...

We have a tenor viol hanging on the wall, and it looks very pretty there - our predecessors had a wall full of mandolins, guitars and banjos, if I remember rightly - the one thing I would avoid is an outside wall, for fear of damp. It also does depend rather on the fluctuations in temperature your room experiences, and you might be best to monitor that for a bit first - if there are wild swings in temperature, a case is definitely the best bet...

We did also briefly hang the viol up in a case, but that looked awful.

I hummed and aaa'd about this for a long time last year and eventually hung my violin on the wall in my lounge. It actually hangs on the same wall as the log fire but it never gets warm. It's a fairly dusty room too but the violin has no dust inside it and it never hangs still long enough to gather dust. I always wipe it after playing and it's always clean.

There are two reasons I did this. Firstly my violin was hand-made by a relative novice who hasn't got the knack of varnishing yet. The varnish on Martha hadn't been allowed to dry properly between coats and was rather soft. All the advice I was given was to let her 'air dry' as much as possible. I don't know if it's really helped because the chin-rest, shoulder-rest and bridge have all 'bent' the varnish down to the wood although the damage seems to have stopped getting worse now(she was like that when I bought her). I've been advised the only cure is a complete re-varnish by an expert but that's really not feasible .

The lesser reason I hang her there is because it's quite a tradition in Scottish folk history to have the fiddle on the wall by the fire for lifting down for a 'tune' in the evenings. It hasn't done generations of Scottish fiddles any harm from the ones I've seen! It certainly makes me play a lot more because I can just grab her off the wall instead of where she would have to live in her case in a different room. I'm now going to put a hook up for my viola too.

However, I think I'd think twice about hanging a very expensive violin there

Another thing to be aware of is direct sunlight in the room - my teaching room faces south-east and it is just getting to the time of year when I get very strong sunlight in the room (if we ever get any sunny weather!) for part of the day. Would really do some serious damage to instruments. I have a slatted wooden blind to cut down the intensity, but even so wouldn't leave instruments out all day in that particular room.

A degree of softness/delicacy in a varnish is generally regarded as a good thing. If, for example, you ever get the chance to see the Messiah Strad at the Ashmolean in Oxford, you'll see that despite the fact that it's hardly been played since it was made, there are areas where the delicate varnish has chipped off. This shows how soft/delicate the legendary Stradivari varnish is, and also explains why many of the old Cremonese violins have hardly any original varnish remaining (making the attractive "wear pattern" that modern makers often spend ages trying to emulate), despite having been treasured as extremely valuable objects for all their existence. Strad varnish is also reputed to be so soft as to be able to take a fingerprint impression after a fairly short period of contact.

When formulated/applied properly, this kind of varnish has a kind of "alive" quality and will shrink, develop texture and change colour over the years in a beautiful, subtle way that the "bulletproof" varnish applied to factory instruments will never achieve.

It may well be that the person who made your fiddle didn't know what they were doing in the varnish department, but soft varnish, done properly, is not an intrinsically bad thing (even violins by the very best professional makers will often show some varnish damage in the regions you describe).

hmm, that's good point about the direct sunlight--i think almost all of my free wall space gets sun at some time of the day, so maybe this is a bad idea. i might put some more shelves up, but it does look nicer to have things just hanging on the wall ;-)

Wow that's really interesting You can certainly make a fingerprint on Martha but I was led to believe this wasn't good.. and there are a few small chips too. It looks really bad under the chin and shoulder rest where the varnish has wrinkled like unset jam My poor baby maybe does take after all those strads after all!

But seriously even the top makers wouldn't be pleased to see this level of varnish softness on an instrument under 3 years old?

And is it a bad thing for a violin not to have varnish totally covering it?

Most luthiers store their violins like that, River, so I don't see any problem with you doing it.

Lottie, from what you say, it sounds like a bad varnish job on your violin. If I were you, I'd take it back to the person who made it and insist they re-varnished it free of charge for you (assuming they've got the hang of it by now ).

And is it a bad thing for a violin not to have varnish totally covering it?
Varnishing a violin has several steps, one of the earliest of which is the application of a "ground" layer over which the coloured varnish is applied. If done properly, the ground layer will adequately protect the wood even where the colour layers are absent. As a backup, the instrument is often french polished over the top of the coloured varnish and any exposed ground layer, which is why many old classical italian violins are incredibly shiny (a lot of people frown on this "overpolishing" for obvious reasons).

Just a quick and slightly off topic post to say how happy I am to have someone like Discopants on the board - violinmakers are hard to come by (even amateur ones) and having easy access to specialist knowledge like this is really useful for us - especially for those forum members who don't have access to their own luthier.

Ta - I suppose, is what I'm saying!

What a nice thing to say.
Thanks!

It's been a couple of weeks since I played (been ill ) and Martha has been happily hanging away. I noticed today though that you can no longer make a fingerprint on her varnish where it used to be very soft on her back... I presume it has 'dried out' now (over the last 18months). I remember visiting the violin shop where all their instruments were hanging out on the walls, or sitting on shelves, so the air can't be a bad thing.

Question: could hanging in the 'air' 24/7 damage the strings at all?

I don't think so, most violin shops leave all their instruments hanging on the walls all the time - I know my luthier does.