Posted on April 29, 2021May 21, 2025 by Dale Phillips

In Defense of the Amateur

In Defense of the Amateur

by Nicholas Von Robison

Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly Volume11, #4, 1983 and Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1998

This is an age of specialists, and I am by nature as well as habit an amateur. This is a dangerous thing to confess because full-time luthiers are likely to turn up their noses. “What you really mean is,” they say, “a dilettante; a playboy of the art and science of lutherie.” I’m afraid they are at least partly right. When once asked if I had a claim to fame, the best I could come up with was: I think I know more about lutherie than any other horticulturalist and more about plant life than any other luthier.

I could put up a solemn defense of we who choose the overall view. “Amateur” literally means lover, and an amateur of lutherie very often loves the wonderful world of musical instruments in a way that the specialist builder probably did when he or she was young but maybe has forgotten while trying to keep up with all the knowledge that has unfolded in the past ten years. The important thing is that amateurs are lovers of whatever they are amateurs of.

At least that is the excuse I give myself. I think what I have wanted most out of life is to find living itself rewarding. I’m sure that I have wanted that more than I wanted wealth or fame. As Thoreau said, “I don’t want to feel when I come to die that I have never lived.” Like Thoreau, I am inclined to say that I came into this world not primarily to make it a better place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. And that is part of the amateur spirit. I haven’t always been happy. Who has? But I have usually been interested and involved.

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Posted on July 24, 2020May 8, 2025 by Dale Phillips

Area Tuning the Violin

Area Tuning the Violin

by Keith Hill

Originally published as Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #283, 1984 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000

See also,
Hints for Area Tuning the Violin by Keith Hill

Announcements of “discoveries” of the “secrets” of Stradivarius usually are not worth the ink used to print them. When they appear, everyone reads them with the customary curiosity. Then away they are filed along with the hundreds of other such claims. They get dredged up again when someone writes yet another book on the violin. Mindful of this possible fate, I would like to offer an explanation of a discovery that I have made. It is not of the “secrets” of Stradivarius; rather it is, I believe, the acoustical system utilized by the ancient Italian violin makers.

The system is simplicity itself. It is possible for anyone who understands it and has normal hearing to use it. Moreover, it requires no measuring equipment save the ears and possibly a monochord. Furthermore, the thicknesses and their inexplicable variants, which so annoy our modern sense of decency when we observe them in the finest violins by Stradivari and Guarneri, occur naturally as a result of this system. Because it is so simple, it is, of course, the last place one would think to look for the answer. I expect that once you are equipped with the following information, you will go to your nearest antique Italian fiddle and look to see if what I am saying is actually there.

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Posted on July 8, 2020May 8, 2025 by Dale Phillips

Hints for Area Tuning the Violin

Hints for Area Tuning the Violin

by Keith Hill

Originally published in American Lutherie #1, 1985 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000

See also,
Area Tuning the Violin by Keith Hill

In my article “Area Tuning the Violin” I presented my discovery of one of the theoretical principles governing the acoustical quality of the violins made by Stradivarius and his numerous Italian contemporaries. Because I believe that the area-tuning principle is the most important of all the acoustical principles pertinent to violin making, I deemed it best to present it in isolation.

I would be less than open with you if I did not say that the American Acoustical Society and the Catgut Acoustical Society both rejected the worthiness of the area-tuning principle. I feel that their reasons were full of vested self-interest. I tell you what I told them: Paying attention to flexibility of free plates is a waste of time and attention. Consider the following points.

First, thousands of violins have been made using this notion for the last century, yet no consistently superior results have been produced.

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Posted on July 6, 2020May 21, 2025 by Dale Phillips

Spiritual Lutherie

Spiritual Lutherie

by Raphael Weisman

Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly, Volume 9 #3, 1981 and Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1997

We are all, in some way, the samurai warriors of today. Our weapons are our tools, our disciplines and skills are our crafts, and our aim is the refining and perfecting of ourselves as artists, as craftspeople, and as human beings. I am becoming more and more aware of my quest, of my journey in this field, and only a small amount of it really has to do with making instruments.

I see life as a university, a school, the school of the soul where we come to learn as much as we can in a brief spell. This world is the world of the physical, the material, the world of money and nature. It is here that we can learn the most and the fastest because this world offers us an opportunity to experience. And it is through experience that we grow in consciousness, in awareness, and in form. We are the molders of our experience, and through the process of experiencing, we learn. Through learning and refining, we grow.

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Posted on January 9, 2020May 21, 2025 by Dale Phillips

In Praise of the Plywood Bass

In Praise of the Plywood Bass

by Frederick C. Lyman, Jr.

Originally published in American Lutherie #4, 1985 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000

see also,
Building a Plywood Bass by Richard Ennis

It has been said that in order to produce fine wines, one must have had generations of alcoholics in one’s family. Only then can one approach the problem with the necessary patience, devotion, and understanding that will result in superior, classic vintages. Mere cleverness or mere industry will not suffice; one has to be locked into the project by the merciless and irreversible forces of destiny.

Similarly, those who are involved in the production of bass sounds seem to require a kind of demonic motivation. They must be attuned, in a special way, to the pulsations of the subaudible register, the tone-feelings that seem to arise from the nether regions. From this unholy obsession with the depths of auditory sensibility comes a fundamental understanding which will forever elude the fiddlers and flautists.

What we mean is that bassists have a deep need to make those sounds, and they will find a way to do it. It’s not a question of what is practical or expedient or wise: Bassists are driven. They have a pathological fascination with deep sounds; they are not well without them.