Attribution

[Martin Sheridan]

Ken,
I agree completely.
I don't think there is a bass expert. Too many basses were made without labels, labels can be falsified or copied, taken out of one bass and put into another etc. Then there is the money motive which has caused many false assertions of authorship.
Finally bass makers can't make the same number of instruments that a violin maker could make in the same amount of time. So we don't get the chance to see very many legitimate examples.
In the Henry Ford Museum in Deerborn, Michigan there are three violins: a Stradivari, a Guarneri and I believe a Gagliano. Until not too long ago it was thought that the Gagliano was a Guarneri. Even having a lot of money is no assurance that you're buying what you think you are getting.
The work of the classical violin makers, especially the top five or ten is well known and I think there are some people who can spot these instruments because they've worked in shops or owned shops where they've seen enough legitmate examples. Yet, as Arnold pointed out recently, some of the 19th and early 20th century English makers, such as the Voller Brothers, were able to pass their instruments off as the real thing.
I have made other instruments besides basses, but many bass makers only make basses because of their love of the instrument, and most of us are bass players. We spend most of our time repairing basses, so few of us are able to make more than one or two basses a year. We might only make 10 to 30 basses in our lifetime. Two hundred years from now some of those instruments will not have survived and the others will be spread around the globe. The chance that a shop will see even one of our basses is remote and authentication will be almost nil.

I just wanted our readers to be aware that the terms used in authentication have a specific meaning; that "ascribed to" for example as a very different meaning that "attributed to".

[Arnold Schnitzer]

Here's an attribution you hear a lot amongst bassists: "Looks like a picture I saw of a _______".

[Martin Sheridan]

I heard another last week that I hadn't heard in sometime. The player said he owned a Frankenstein....the back and sides Italian, the top something else, the neck and scroll from something else.

Also, In line Arnold with what you are saying; most players don't "see" the instrument. When you spend your days and years as we do making and repairing you see the instrument in a much different way, like an artist might look at a face differently and more thoroughly than we do. When I first started looking at violins, for example, they all looked the same to me. Once I started to carve violins I began seeing all of the nuances. A former apprentice of mine who was a fine violist told me after carving her first bridge that she'd been looking at them all of her life and never knew they looked like that.