Talk of Fakes (or Antiqued newer Basses) came up......

[Ken Smith]

Originally Posted by Eric Rene Roy

I think the labeling and misrepresentation of pedigree is deceitful, not the antiquing.

Yes Eric, true but the labeled instruments are Antiqued to deceive.

I had a 5-string in my hands a few months ago that was a huge 4/4 sized Bass with an early 20th century Italian label. The price was too good to be true and it was. I looked over the Bass which by the way sounded and looked fantastic but came to my own conclusion that it was a fake or misplaced labeled Hungarian Bass.

Then I was offered another huge 4/4 5er but was told that the Bass was fairly new. It too was antiqued as well but unlabeled. On both Orchestra concerts I used it on I was asked "How old is that Bass?". It looked and sounded old or rather it did not sound new.

My Pollmann is antiqued somewhat as well as my Lott copy. These two Basses are labeled correctly and honestly. I agree that it's the labeling that is the deceit but they are antiqued as well. This does not stop people from putting labels in at the shop level afterwards. My Lott copy could easily be relabeled as a late 19th century English maker and no one would blink!

To make my point, please look at the 2 Scrolls pictured and try to date them from looks alone. Do not use my website to look up the dates. Try and give your first impression from looks alone. If you can, look at the webpages for each Bass and disregard the names and dates as if they are not there and tell me how old the Bass itself appears to be on its own.




Have fun...

[Ken McKay]

Here is something odd to me. Look at the contrast in work on the same bass. The corner work is first class showing a superb bee-sting, yet the f-fluting looks as if the maker didn't know how to sharpen a gouge or plane.

I have done a lot of faux antiquing myself (still working on making it convincing ) so I have developed an eye for a fake. Most antiquing done for artistic reasons does not involve wood destruction except maybe a few dings and dents. And corners might be worn in a realistic way, but that seems rare to me, at least in violins. And the lack of cracks is also a tell tale as Ken said.

Varnish wears in different ways but creates patterns that are very difficult to duplicate. Good varnish does not stick completely to the ground underneath and flakes off in large sections early on in its life. The sections that do stick, however, seem to stick forever. The sections where the varnish is gone should show old wood.

The wood underneath the varnish is the hardest to get to look old by artificial means. A general aged gold/yellow will do the trick but does not have the subtle dark honey tone of real aged wood.

Makers like the Kramers (Pohlman) have a "stylized" aging that the Germans are known for. It is very nice looking but easily recognizable.

[Ken Smith]

Forgive me for only having the Back 'bee sting' displayed. The Top and Back rarely match on any Bass as working Maple or Spruce is quite different. The Top usually looks much older than the Back on old Basses because it takes more of a beating.

Look here at the Top and Back pics of the Bass.


There is some gouging in the C-bouts that looks like 'after' graduation work;


On this Bass Ken, the maker was NOT the same person that antiqued the Bass. The Scroll work however matches the antiquing process. The Corner work was done by the maker. A different hand entirely. All the Corners on this Bass are 'stung', Top and Back. The extra gouging in and around the 'F' flutes were done as antiquing after the Bass was made. That was a 'red flag' as well to my eye.

This Bass however sounded great in the Orchestra and even did a few jazz gigs with it. It stood on its own and sounded at least as old as it was 'trying' to look. It was a good Bass, period!

[Matthew Heintz]

Originally Posted by Ken McKay

Here is something odd to me. Look at the contrast in work on the same bass. The corner work is first class showing a superb bee-sting, yet the f-fluting looks as if the maker didn't know how to sharpen a gouge or plane.

Educate me. I'm ignorant. What exactly are ya'll seeing in the f-fluting?

[Ken Smith]

Originally Posted by Matthew Heintz

Educate me. I'm ignorant. What exactly are ya'll seeing in the f-fluting?

Ken McKay sees that the antique work looks different than the makers hand in the Purfling bee sting work. He is 100% correct. The Bass was antiqued 'after' it was made and done by a different person. The F-fluting was altered to show wear and distress.

[Arnold Schnitzer]

Some "craftsman" took a concave scraper to the area around the f-holes and scraped the crap out of it to try and make it look handmade. But the texture is localized, which makes it obvious fakery.

[Matthew Heintz]

Originally Posted by Arnold Schnitzer

Some "craftsman" took a concave scraper to the area around the f-holes and scraped the crap out of it to try and make it look handmade. But the texture is localized, which makes it obvious fakery.

Got it. Thank you.

[Jeff Bollbach]

This is an interesting and dangerous subject. I use the word dangerous because I believe now is the time that fraudulent basses are apt to enter the market in heretofore unprecedented numbers. There have always been deceptive copies of the smaller instruments simply due to the fact that they had value. But most of us know older bassists who were able to pick up great Italian basses for a few hundred dollars not too long ago. No one is going to bother to expertly copy such an instrument without much value. However, nowadays with basses fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars its a completely different story. While it is a daunting task to construct a convincing copy of a golden age Cremonese bass it is a bit less challenging to create a replica of an Italian bass 50 to 100 years old. Like Ken's "Bisiach", instruments in this price range are now worth putting the effort in to make a fraud. Now in the violin world there are more than a few experts who would be very hard to fool, they have just so much history doing that kind of thing. The bass world is a different story. I think Ken has a really great eye and I have nothing but respect for Arnold. However I think that few of us [myself included] in the bass world are very well prepared if we start seeing masterful forgeries of basses. Here's a story to illustrate how one of the most prominent experts was fooled. I took in a bass on trade some years ago from Bill Blossom of the NYP. It was labeled as a Dalla Costa and in fact was apparently Italian and of that period although I doubted that name strongly. Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa was said to make a few basses but his workmanship was highly masterful and this bass was anything but. The bass came to me without a scroll so I resolved to fashion a convincing fake. I pulled out all the stops and was pleased with the result. I sold the bass to a nice fellow new to the Houston Symphony letting him know of course that the scroll was a new one. A little less than two years passed and he graciously called me to say he loved the bass but was trading it in for a bigger bass [it was a little delicate]. It went to a very large internationally known shop. Some time went by and I got a call from the then stranger to me Ken Smith. His keen observational skills had noticed that I detailed on my website the construction of the fake and in fact it was listed on this "internationally known expert appraiser's" online archives as a bonafide Dalla Costa with original scroll and was sold as such. Ken found that quite amusing as did I. I am still amazed he figured that out. You might say-well you did a good job and I did, but not that good. A real expert would have known it was a forgery. It is just my opinion that at this time it is not that hard to put over a forgery so anyone contemplating buying an old bass really needs to be aware of this.