Ta-daaaa!! Beginning the celebration of my 50th year of making musical instruments! My very first was an Appalachian dulcimer (shown above in a rare photo), made in a "class" organized through a little "storefront high school" in Montpelier, Vermont, in 1972. I was a hippy kid, living in a commune my mom had left me at when she went off to "save the world" (last I checked she wasn't successful!). The local public high school didn't work out for me; after a painful year of "homeschooling", I found this little place called "The Montpelier Educational Facility". The deal was, you could go in and tell the Director what you wanted to study, and they would try to find someone in the community to teach you. The Director was a wonderfully skilled musician, and I had the idea I'd like to learn to build a banjo (a woman at the commune played old-time banjo a bit, and I was really drawn to it). That was how I got connected to a young artist/sculptor and dulcimer builder named Ken Riportella, who was to become an important mentor for the next several years. The first thing I made with his help was this dulcimer; I believe the wood was birds-eye maple from the commune's voluminous firewood pile. This is one of only two pictures I have of it (we didn't all have smart phones back then, to take pictures of everything with; and I didn't have a camera of my own. I still don't have a smart phone, but I do have a camera now!), and the picture quality is certainly lousy, but there it is...my first instrument!

 

    

Here's another picture of that first dulcimer. 

 

In the middle is my second instrument, the banjo I'd wanted to make. Made in '73. Square was way easier than round! The wooden top was 1/8" "doorskin" plywood from the Weyerhauser hollow core door factory dumpster (we only used the finest materials!!). This is the banjo I learned to play on. I made a case out of an old raincoat I got at the Catholic Daughters Rummage Sale in Montpelier (VT), which was presided over by identical octogenarian twin sisters (dressed in matching plaid outfits! Life was good!) and I took this banjo everywhere with me for a couple of years, learning to play it. My then teacher, Ken, led a field trip to New York City, where I went for the first time to the Metropolitan Museum and was blown away by the musical instrument collection (Ken later had an instrument of his become part of that collection for a year). The instrument on the right in this picture was inspired by a Chinese "Moon Lute" that I saw at the museum and was very taken with. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to tune it to, or how to play it, and my construction was pretty crude! Still, you gotta start somewhere, and I give myself A for Effort!

 

Here's a dulcimer I made for one of the guys in my commune "family", probably 1973 or '74. 

 

By this time I was already beginning to experiment with shapes and designs.  The Appalachian dulcimer is a great vehicle for that because there aren't a lot of conventions surrounding how it has to sound or look; my mentor, Ken, was doing wildly sculptural stuff with his dulcimers, and at that point he was my main influence.  We didn't know a lot about acoustics, or tonewoods.  We did progress from dumpster-salvaged "doorskin" plywood to solid wood purchased in 1/8" thick sheets from a place called "Craftsman Wood Service".  Generally, this was flat-sawn hardwood: cherry was one of our favorite woods.  For frets we used brazing rod (or even finishing nails!) glued into grooves we filed.  We did figure out how to place the frets, using a formula from Irving Sloane's book "Classic Guitar Construction", which Ken had found a copy of somewhere.  That book was kind of a bible for us; I certainly studied it, and if nothing else learned from it that there was a lot of technical aspects of instrument building that we were pretty clueless about.  Still, we persevered!  

 

When I was 17 (or was it 18?), I lived with Ken Riportella for a few months one winter, in a friends house when they were away, traveling.  We set up a little shop in the upstairs, where I watched Ken design amazing things, and worked a bit on my own projects.  I made a large, kind of boat-like dulcimer (which I have no pictures of, sadly), and kept it hanging on the wall of the living room.  One day I came back from a play rehearsal in town to discover that the dulcimer was not in its usual spot.  When I asked, Ken said, "I sold it for you".  What?  I guess I was pleased initially, but then I asked him how much he sold it for:  "$200." he told me.  I was quite upset about that...not because he'd sold it without asking me, but because he'd sold it for way too much!!!  I'm afraid my business acumen hasn't progressed much in all these years;  it's still hard for me to deal with the money thing.

 

Here are a couple more instruments from probably around 1974.

 

I was fascinated by bowed instruments, and thought I wanted to learn violin building.  I was learning to play fiddle at the time, but knew nothing about their construction; these were built using materials and techniques I'd been using for dulcimers and wooden banjos.  The one on the left was a 6-string fiddle: 3 doubled courses.  An interesting idea that didn't work!  The one on the right was a "vielle", sort of a small, viola da gamba-like thing with 4 strings, made for one of my dear friends at the commune.  It eventually found its way into the hands of Chris Kenney, a marvelous singer/conductor, and I had the great pleasure of hearing him perform on it some years later.  Both of these instruments were a bit crude, and both defied what I know now to be many of the basic rules of western bowed instrument construction.  They had flat tops and backs, rather than the carved plates typical of modern violin-family instruments, and the tops were of cherry-wood instead of the usual (and more resonant) spruce.  Additionally, I believe they did not have sound-posts, which would have been typical of medieval fiddles and many ethnic bowed instruments, but are an integral component of later viol and violin-family instruments.  The sound was thin, hollow and in a way mysteriously evocative; very different than the full, broad, warmer tone of a violin: "glassy" is one way I've heard that sound described.

 

I never did get to study violin-building formally, but having partnered with a wonderful violin-builder (my sweetie Suzy), I got to spend many years seeing them get built, even helping sometimes, and absorbing what I could of the process.  More recently I've had the opportunity to work with Suzy making a couple of cellos with sympathetic strings (more on those later in this series), and I'm beginning to get an understanding of more traditional violin-family construction.  But as I look back, I'm impressed at my relative fearlessness in "just doing it", and especially that some beautiful music got made from these experiments!