Following the Rules There are two approaches to making instruments. The first approach is where you decide there is one right way to build a violin, and then you have to use the wood that works with the way that…
Making Violins from North American Wood
Wood is the essential material that makes violin making possible. Living here in the Vermont countryside, there is an abundance of interesting wood growing all around me. In my fifty years of violin making, I have experimented with very different…
Advice for Aspiring Luthiers
Learn who you are. Your level of experience and your personality are going to show in your work, and that’s the way that it should be. Don’t try to make your instruments look or sound like anyone’s but your own.…
Working at the HatchSpace
This summer and fall, I’m working every Wednesday afternoon at the HatchSpace, a woodworking cooperative in downtown Brattleboro. It is an opportunity to experience what it is like to work in a different space, one that has lots of other…
Strad, Ford, and Italy
In order to study, learn from, and react in an orderly way to all that the great violin maker Antonio Stradivari’s work has to offer, I have undertaken an annual series of 300th anniversary instruments, making copies of Strad violins…
The 15” Cut-Away Viola, Revisited
In the 2006 edition of my newsletter The Scroll, I wrote about an experimental 15” viola model I was developing.
Koff Model Violin
Robert Koff offered me encouragement in many forms, one of which was access to and insight into his Vuillaume violin. He played this violin in the Julliard Quartet for several years and he considered it the perfect instrument, with a dark chocolaty quality and plenty of power and punch. Robert’s violin was made in the Paris workshop of Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, probably around 1860.
Maggini 1610 Commission
Until recently, the work of Giovanni Paolo Maggini has not been of great interest to me. Perhaps it is the number of ill-conceived copies I’ve seen that clouded my view. Jack Harris approached me with the idea of building for…
A Special History: Violin Opus 157
“Ginn” 1691 Long Pattern Strad copy I had built two violins patterned on Marylou Churchill’s very large long pattern Strad before making this violin. One went to one of her students and the other she used as a back-up instrument,…
Early Work: Baroque Violin Opus 11
Baroque Violin #11 This was the first of the violins I built as part of my work for J. Bradley Taylor. Beginning in 1978 I devoted one day a week to making new violins with a separate workshop set up where…