A concertmaster’s son and a string-making hobby.

Warchal is a Slovak string maker built on a family name already well known in Slovak music. Bohdan Warchal (1930–2000), a violinist and conductor, founded the Slovak Chamber Orchestra in Bratislava in 1960; Slovak Wikipedia dates its first concert to 11 April 1960 and notes that audiences knew the ensemble as “Warchalovci,” the Warchals. He led it for some forty years, and minor planet 28019 Warchal, discovered in 1998, is named after him, according to Wikipedia’s list of minor-planet names.

The string company is the work of his son, Bohdan Warchal Jr., a violinist who, the company says, graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, joined his father’s orchestra in 1989 and later became its concertmaster, teaches in Bratislava and wrote a book, The Natural Way of Playing the Violin. In a 2010 FAQ the company said the idea grew from a shared interest of father and son in violin-making and sound, and that in the late 1990s the son took up string-making as a hobby because he was not always satisfied with the strings on sale; after several years he was making strings for himself and friends.

In 2003 he set up a company in Slovakia to produce them. The Slovak commercial register shows Warchal, spol. s r.o., a limited company, entered on 11 July 2003, with Bohdan Warchal and Anna Warchalová as its partners and managing directors and the manufacture of bowed string instruments and their accessories among its registered activities. Its first website, archived in November 2003, was a holding page announcing the manufacture of strings for bowed instruments.

Precious stones, then a Beast.

Warchal names its strings like a jeweller. The company’s 2010 FAQ says its first three sets — two for professionals and a cheaper one for students — were named after precious stones in their Slovak spellings, Ametyst, Karneol and Nefrit, because it did not expect to sell abroad. By 2006, when it developed a new set for its most demanding customers, the strings were sold around the world, so it chose an English name, Brilliant. Later products include the Amber and Timbre sets and the Avantgarde A string, and the company says it introduced helix violin E strings and a synthetic core it calls W-core.

The catalogue has kept growing. Strings magazine reported in its November–December 2019 issue that Warchal had launched Phoenix, a limited-edition line of violin strings recycled from used Warchal strings collected from customers, at €100 a set. In its July–August 2025 issue the magazine described “Slovakian string company Warchal” naming its newest soloist violin set The Beast, with silver-wound G and D strings, a hydronalium A and a steel helix E, at €143.50, and noted that it was the first set in new packaging as the company moved away from plastic.

Warchal’s communication is unusually explanatory. It places its sets on graphic scales — brilliant to warm, projective to subtle and, in newer charts, “altered” to “natural” — and its blog explains string breakage, cleaning and bridge correction. It published a “Big Rosin Test” comparing rosins on its website by 2012, and its shop now sells rosins and adjusters alongside its strings, including some from other makers such as Leatherwood and Wittner.

Strings, rosin and fittings.

The seven brands here make the small things string players handle daily, in four trades. Two make shoulder rests. Kun was started in Ottawa by Joseph Kun, who, the company says, left Czechoslovakia for Canada in 1968 and had the design patent for its first rest published in 1972; it says its products are made in Canada. Bon Musica is the trade name of Bonmusica OHG of Vettweiß, in western Germany, whose own product notes describe the bendable, plastic-coated aluminium rest it manufactures.

Two work on the bow. CodaBow began in Winona, Minnesota, in 1993 as a partnership between the materials scientist Stan Prosen and the engineer Jeff Van Fossen, its early website said, and describes its carbon-fibre bows as made in the USA. Hidersine, the British rosin maker, says on its website that it was founded in London in 1890, though the same site has also given 1876; it says the music company Barnes & Mullins bought it in 1987 and moved production to Oswestry, in Shropshire.

Two make strings. Jargar was founded in Denmark by Jarl Hansen, a cellist in the Royal Danish Orchestra, after experimenting from 1950; its website now calls it part of the Thomastik-Infeld family. Warchal, a Slovak company, was established in 2003 by the violinist Bohdan Warchal Jr., concertmaster of the Slovak Chamber Orchestra, which his father founded in 1960.

The seventh, Wittner, makes metronomes and fittings. It says Gustav Wittner founded it in 1895; it is based in Isny im Allgäu, labels almost all its products Made in Germany, and since 2024 has belonged to GEWA music of Adorf, in Saxony.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Not handmade. Headmade.”

The company remains small and privately held. The Slovak register lists no outside owner — the same two partners have held it since 2003 — and in 2021 its registered office moved from the Bratislava region to the Banská Bystrica region in central Slovakia. The company says its founder coordinates research in its own sound laboratory, and its 2010 FAQ described the business as a small company set up in Slovakia to produce strings; we found no independent report describing its production, so where the strings are made rests on the company’s word and its registered activities.

Its policies are part of its identity. In a blog post on its giveaway policy, Warchal says it stopped handing out free strings to teachers, students and soloists — a practice it says string makers borrowed from sports-equipment sponsorship — so it could spend the money on research, and instead lets registered customers buy their first set of any type at half price, a scheme it calls Trial Purchase. Its website quotes violinists including Václav Hudeček, Shlomo Mintz and Josef Suk praising the strings; those are the company’s chosen testimonials. It sells directly online from what it calls an EU-based shop, runs a programme for luthiers that it says does not require them to stop selling other brands, and offers a mobile app for musicians. Its slogans are “Fascinated by sound” and “Warchal strings are not handmade. They are headmade.”

For a design guide, Warchal shows how a young maker can draw on a family name while building its own vocabulary of gemstones, sound scales and plain-spoken explanations. Compare Thomastik-Infeld, the Viennese maker of synthetic-core strings, and Larsen Strings, the Danish string maker. For this guide we use amethyst, carnelian and nephrite green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Warchal’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.