Own a Piece of History
V. Richelieu Special Edition Violins & Violas
Premium Tonewoods & Expert Craftsmanship
The Heart of Innovation
Our Luthiers' Passion. Your Unique Sound.
Our luthiers are a creative bunch and love to innovate. Each year they apply their creative juices to the creation of new designs that we offer as special editions. Whether they feature a new model or new materials, the attention to detail, quality, and performance never falters.
Expanding the Sound Palette
Sourcing Tonewoods from the American Landscape
A Symphony of Surprise
Discovering the Unique Voices of American Woods
We enjoy building a diversity of models using a range of woods that give players a broad choice of sound and color.
While developing new V. Richelieu models, we explored alternative tonewood sources. New England has exported spruce, maple and other woods for hundreds of years. The United States is currently one of the worlds largest timber suppliers. In Vermont where we work, neighbors, carpenters and a broader network of wood sources regularly stop by or contact us with a variety of North American spruce and maple species. We took advantage of the opportunity to compare these woods in violas with the standard European tonewoods we felt familiar with. Like violin makers in the 17th and 18th century, we expanded our wood selection and sound.
The selection of woods and sound surprised us. Red spruce from Maine feels and sounds different from red spruce from the Adirondaks. Sitka spruce that had been used as “soak logs” in rivers to hold salmon nets worked (and smelled) differently than new Sitka spruce. We compared red maple from the Catskills, red maple from Maine; big leaf maple from the Coquille reservation in Oregon, big leaf maple from parts of Washington State. We explored further with Myrtle, Sycamore and Cherry. We built over 300 instruments, collecting sound and density data for the different woods. Initial data collection suggests north American forests contain a diverse variety of potential tonewoods that would benefit the sound pallet.
Find the Instrument that Resonates with You
