A cellist (L.H.) from Minnesota writes: “I get all the stuff about humidity, in fact I’m a bit over the top in keeping my cello room as close to 40% as I can. I lug literally buckets of water a day there – spilling as I go – and I still have two problems. 1. At least once a season, I have seams open and need to be re-glued, and 2. My strings are always too low at this time each winter and too high in August. What am I doing wrong?”

Dear L.H.

Both things you describe are actually normal in your climate, or at least are not preventable by normal efforts. Remember that in the summer your humidity reaches 70-80%, and right now you are 40% at best, according to your letter. Your cello is gradually losing the moisture it acquired in August and depending on the sensitivity of the wood in your instrument – they do vary – things are going to contract. Hence open seams.

The string height question is an interesting one. Some people blame it all on the bridge shrinking, and to a minimal degree the bridge does shrink in the winter, but the bigger series of events is the combination of woods – top, back, ribs, block, all moving, or not moving relative to each other to force the neck angle to be higher in the winter than in the summer. Most cellists in Vermont have two bridges to allow for this: some have three. As the string height reaches critical numbers – too high or too low – a more appropriate bridge is put on.

By the way, like heart surgery and bungee jumping, I don’t recommend trying this at home. If you loosen all your strings to replace your bridge, your sound post can fall, or at least move. Have your luthier do it for you. At the same time he can do your seasonal post adjustment – critical in northern climes – and check for open seams and other cello misbehavior.

Next time we’ll talk about a topic with a little controversy – old vs. new cellos.

Most photographs of any great cellist include a fine old instrument, usually Italian, usually 200-300 years old. Many players come to our shop specifically to try older instruments. Often people who do buy newer cellos prefer them to be antiqued so that they at least look old. Yet there are some great makers working today: are their instruments always going to be inferior to older ones, or is the old-instrument belief a myth?

Certainly an instrument dealer who sells only new cellos will be tempted to tell you that the old ones are fragile, any repairs will come apart, that you will have nothing but trouble, etc. A dealer of only older cellos will often distain new instruments as having a “new” (read tinny, not rich, inferior etc.) Is either right?

As dealers with an inventory of about equal numbers of new and old cellos, we have quite a bit of experience with both and it isn’t our financial interest to convince you to buy one over the other. Here are some facts that we believe to be true based on a lot of years working with both newer and older cellos:

1. There is a physical difference in new wood and old wood. Here’s an experience that we think is telling. A few years ago a customer’s 100 year-old bass had an accident in which the top was destroyed beyond repair. I first called colleagues looking for a good piece of wood to make a new top from; I didn’t find the wood I was looking for but did, almost unbelievably, locate a “new” top, which by some miracle was adaptable to the bass. The amazing part was that the top had been sitting in a shop for almost 100 years. What I learned from the process of cutting the purfling channel was that unlike cutting through wood a few years old, which the cutter goes through relatively easily, in the old top each winter grain (the grain lines you see in your cello top) almost completely stopped the cutter which had to re-sharpened with almost every grain. The winter grains in old wood are much harder than in new wood.

2. In my experience brittle wood sounds better than springy wood. Older wood is more likely to be brittle than new wood but this is not always the case.

3. There is in general an “old sound” and a “new sound” that is discernable when you try the two side by side: especially in a smaller space. Many people prefer the woodier sound of the older instruments, usually darker and, well, older. Interestingly this difference seems to diminish somewhat as the size of the performing space increases.

4. New-makers with supplies of old wood have eliminated some of the distinction between old and new sound: though not entirely since wood that has been vibrated for 100-300 years will sound “older” than wood of the same age that has not been vibrated.

5. Newer instruments (good ones) tend to have a slightly bigger sound than comparable quality older ones although there are a lot of exceptions to this..

6. Older cellos can be expensive, especially if they’re made by the right person from the right part of the world. Less expensive older cellos are becoming more difficult to find, but they do exist and some of them are great players.

7. Good sounding new cellos under $5000.00 do not all come from Europe anymore.

Next time we’ll talk specifically about cellos in the $2000-7000 range, both old and new: what to look for, and how to find a treasure.