Cecilio 4/4 CEVN-2BL Electric/Silent Violin with Ebony Fittings in Blue Metallic Varnish (Full Size) – Ideal for Practice and Performance

The violin is great. It is not absolutely perfect, but for the price you pay, it is amazing. I've played for over 17 years (since I was 5)To start, anything this cheap for any instrument can be expected to be pretty trashy. This violin is so much better than that and is easily worth the $400 it used to be.I hesitated a lot to make this purchase because of some of the negative feedback. Honestly a lot of that negative feedback is coming from 2 types of people:1: New players who have no idea what they are talking about and just complain when the instrument didn't work out for them easily and perfectly. They complain about the tuners (which are perfectly fine for a brand new instrument which will obviously slip in the beginning).2. People who legitimately got a bad product. I actually bought this violin 3 years ago and it came broken. The electronics didn't work, but the return policy was fantastic. At first the company sent me new electronics for free. When it still didn't work they offered me a new violin for free, but I decided just to return it then. So yes, you might get a bad product, but the company policies are great and will right any wrongs if you give them the chance before freaking out and writing a bad review.Just a few CONS:-Bridge is actually pretty high, but NOTE: Every violin bridge comes needing work. There is no such thing as a previously fitted bridge from manufacturing. So people need to stop complaining about this too. Sand it down some, fix the action, and it's perfect.-The bow is a little bit heavy and not the highest quality. What did you expect? It works perfectly, is perfect for playing, and for the price justifies any shortcomings and some.-There is some loose piece (probably wood chip) inside the area they hollowed the violin out for the pickup. This rattles if you shake the violin or turn it upside down. So that really bothers my OCD, but still, is not that big an issue to cry.-A bit of the metallic finish at the scroll did get sprayed onto the fingerboard/fretboard (can't remember what it's called, getting my guitar terms mixed in here). Again, it does not influence the playability, but it does represent a sloppy finish.OVERALLThe violin is so awesome. It's sound is pretty darn good plugged straight into an amp or through the headphones. Plug it into an effects board, and the tones get too sweet to describe. Sand down the bridge a bit and the action is perfect. Ignore the inner jiggling of the loose wood chip and the sloppy finish and you'll be well on your way to enjoying a fantastic instrument at a better than fantastic price!

Keep scrolling of you're looking for an impression from a seasoned player. I'm not one.I've played enough instruments to know if a sound is off though, and once I'd attended enough YouTube University to tune it (and hold it) I was pleasantly surprised to get a pretty clear note.I'm an apartment dweller, but really wanted to learn violin, so the "silent" grabbed by attention. It's not completely silent, it's clearly audible enough to tune by ear and practice with without headphones, BUT it's quiet enough that no one's complaining.Out of the whole kit, it looks like the production cost was all spent on the instrument. Barring the cheap but fully functional electrics, it looks good and has no defects marring playability. All of the tuning hardware does what it's supposed to do, with no issues.The bow is warped and doesn't have curve at all when it's slack, but it more or less functions. The headphones are a couple steps down from the bulk package headphones that public schools hand out with Chromebooks. The rosin more or less does what rosin does. The case is functional and looks decent, should hold up and protect the instrument from minor accidents.I have some Bose QC30 headphones that I love, good rosin is relatively cheap, and I'm enjoying the instrument enough that I'm already reading reviews on new bows.The verdict? As an older beginner who wanted to try it to see if he'd like it, but didn't want to resort to pawn shops and garage sales, I'm pretty stinking happy. It's good enough to get the point across, and cheap enough that it wouldn't have felt like a loss if I decided I don't like learning violin.

That's me, not the violin. Well, actually, it sorta is the violin, too.If you've priced a lot of musical instruments, you've noticed they fall into roughly three groups; professional models start in the low thousands and go up (up, up, up) from there. Student models can come in from a little over $1K to as low as a couple hundred bucks. And under a hundred bucks? That's a toy. The change is very abrupt. The differences between student and professional models need a professional (or a very good student) to really tell. A toy, on the other hand, is unplayable, and would be less than useless for a student (as it would at best teach them all the wrong things -- and more often than not, drive them away from the instrument with the misapprehension that the problem lies with THEM.)I'm saying all this because this is one of those rare birds that is priced like a toy but delivers a good solid student instrument. This isn't a thousand-dollar instrument. But it belongs among the $400-600 student instruments. And you are paying less.Now about that "adult beginner" thing. A child has more access to academic tutoring. To music rooms and private lessons in studios and all of that. They should get a standard acoustic violin with all the peccadillos attendant to that type. Where this ELECTRIC violin truly shines is with the adult beginner, the self-taught and the dilettante; in short, with people who want to be able to "give it a go" at a stringed instrument without losing the lease on their apartment due to the awful noises issuing from it.It isn't silent. It is, however, quiet. Quiet enough you can practice in a thin-walled apartment or an upstairs bedroom without anyone making a fuss. It is just loud enough on its own so you don't really need headphones.The other part of "adult beginner" is I am old and have messed around with a lot of music-related things over the years and I read a ton. So I knew better than to make a lot of first-timer buyer assumptions. For instance; it comes assembled (I hesitate to say "set up") but not tuned. Really, it should come with the bridge in a box and the strings in their packs, but never mind. As an experienced buyer of bargain instruments I didn't even bother tuning the strings it came with and dropped thirty bucks on a new set of Thomastik Alphayue's. I had no trouble with peg slippage (the reverse, actually), but then I'm a uke player and used to having to shove the pegs in to make them firm up.The electronics worked (sans headphones, which came out of the box with one dead channel already but who cares? I've got better headphones already). But that's not really fair to ask of me, because I'm an electronics tinkerer and as long as the pickup was okay I really didn't care if the electronics worked. The finish was nice and none of it came off on my hands, everything seemed straight and nothing has fallen off. In short, a fantastic instrument.A word of caution. I get the impression from other reviews that Cecilio's build quality is excellent but their quality control lacking. You might get a lemon. So box it back up and have them ship another. Because I got one with no issues I've been able to detect. Well, okay...the hairs on the bow are a wee bit ragged, but it is a starter bow anyhow, and a nice student-quality carbon fibre is only another thirty bucks or so. The two purchases I made within a few weeks of starting to play were a Snark tuner and a Resonance shoulder rest. The Snark works just fine clipped to the upper bout, which puts it at a comfortable viewing angle. So give it a good inspection, put some decent strings on it, and be prepared to add a few more bits and pieces to pimp the ride a little, and I think it will support the adult beginner for the first few years of learning to play a violin.