Workbench
Interview: Andrew Carruthers, Luthier
Santa Rosa,
California
The first real stringed
instruments that I made were guitars; at the time I was working at a
national laboratory in Berkeley, California doing research into air
pollution in houses and guitar making was a hobby. A few years later my
girlfriend and I had moved to Bristol, England where she was going to
graduate school. I walked into Dick Bristow's Cremona House violin shop to
get the bridge fixed on my fiddle and I was smitten; within a couple of
months I was enrolled at the nearby Welsh School of Violin Making.
< Andrew
Carruthers / Ruggeri cello back, 2003, Maple (click to
enlarge)
The violin making school was
in the old school house of a one time coal mining village in the valleys
above Cardiff. I was delighted to find that the students came from all
over Europe and from as far away as New Zealand. Not only that but at
thirty I was about average age; most of the students had some other life
experience and were now starting out to do what they had always really
wanted to do. There were six violin making students a year, and the course
lasted three years, the middle year being devoted to the useful skills of
basic repair work.
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The state-sponsored violin making
schools in Britain were established when there had been a shortage of
trained repairmen in the country, but by the time I got to school the need
for repairmen had been filled. At the same time, and rather illogically,
the government was pressuring the schools to expand their class sizes.
While other schools went along with this, the staff of the Welsh School
refused to compromise standards, and sadly it was closed the
year
after I
graduated.
Andrew Carruthers / Ruggeri cello,
2003, Spruce top >
After school I set up
shop in a spare bedroom and started making instruments full time. I priced
reasonably and had two good years. How long thiscould have continued
before the local market was fully satisfied I don't know because we moved
back to the US. I had decided to learn some restoration skills, both as a
more dependable income (I now had a family to support), and to get better
access to good instruments to study. I joined Bein and Fushi in Chicago
and was apprenticed to Russell Wagner, their cello man. After my modest
success as a maker I was feeling pretty confident about my skills and was
surprised to find that I had to re-learn almost everything. It seemed that
I couldn't even sharpen a knife properly. Everything was done to higher
tolerances than I thought was reasonable or possible. In fact
"tolerances" was a concept that they appeared to have trouble
with. One of my biggest bogies initially was the digital caliper, came out
whenever I presented Russell with certain jobs for approval. Eventually,
in self defense, I bought one of my own and things got easier.
Bein & Fushi had a very
strict training and production scheme; repeatable jobs, like cutting a
bridge, or making a new neck were allocated a time, and had to be done in
exactly that time, no more nor less, and to the required standard.
Everyone in the shop turned in the same quantity of work each week, but
your pay increased as the quality of your work improved. Complementing
this scheme was a Darwinian view of who should be allowed to stay in the
workshop. If you failed to meet your quota for a couple of weeks, you
would be presented with a cardboard box to help remove your belongings.
While this regime was not good for the trainee's nerves, the winnowing
process had left a pool of very talented restorers doing uncompromising
work. If Bein & Fushi were strict in workshop matters, they were very
generous in access to instruments, and even the most junior member of the
workshop could sift through the instrument safe and examine thier
ever-changing collection.
< Andrew Carruthers /
Ruggeri cello, 2003, Maple scroll
For most of the three years that I was with Bein & Fushi, I continued making new instruments. To find time for this I would arrive at the Fine Arts Building when they were opening the doors in the morning, and this would allow me two hours of making new instruments before the shop opened for regular business. Bein & Fushi would then sell my instruments for me. I always liked it that while Bein & Fushi sold some of the world's most valued classic instruments, the other end of their range was not antique trade-fiddles, but well made contemporaries, which are sound and reliable and, as I saw demonstrated many times, usually out-perform antiques of several times their monetary value.
After three years with Bein & Fushi, I felt ready to set up on my own again. In 1997 we moved to Santa Rosa, California where I opened my current shop. I work by myself and spend about half my time doing restorations. My regular customers include several of the world's leading violin dealers. The balance of my time is spent making new instruments, and I'm pleased to say that recently, as my instruments become better known, this has been taking up more of my time.
How do you select your wood?
I try to understand what were the
essential qualities of the materials used in successful existing
instruments. The visual aspects are the easiest to assess. Then things
like density, stiffness and stability are a matter of feel and experience.
A lot of information comes from working the wood, the way it cuts and and
flexes, and I'll change the modeling of an instrument as I get familiar
with the piece of wood that I'm working. For cello and viola I use a
European maple. I haven't had much luck with American maple, the stuff
that's come my way has been too hard and dense for my taste. I also use
willow and poplar of various types. There is a wide range of character in
these woods: poplar can be light weight, or it can be even denser than
some of it feels just like good maple under the gouge. 
< Andrew Carruthers / Viola
in Poplar
For tops I use European
spruce and recently I've been using Engelmann Spruce for cello and
viola and getting great results. You have to work it a little differently
but it looks spectacular, and I have a supplier who reliably cuts it
straight which is worth a lot. In general it can be quite frustrating
trying to find properly milled wood.
What influences your choice of varnish?
I mostly use oil varnish, but
occasionally I use spirit, and they each have their own characteristics,
and give me different effects. Oil varnish is a little more flexible. I've
been "antiquing" instruments for a couple of years now. My
object is not to fool people, but simply to enrich the visual feast. I
held off doing this for a long time, because the inconsistencies in
antiqued instruments always bothered me. If the varnish is so worn, then
the general condition of the instrument should match, and few makers are
prepared to provide the required wear and damage to be convincing. I think
of the 
varnish as a finish, something to be enjoyed for its textural and tonal
variety, not necessarily as a representation of something else.
varnish table >
Do you have a particular model that you use, or do you experiment?
In the early days I switched between models a lot, but recently I've found that I learn more by making small changes to the same model. I do Guarneri for violin and Ruggieri for cello. I selected these models because they give me the basic full and robust tone that I like as a starting point, and because they are relatively small and manageable in size. Starting with these basic models I feel quite free to experiment. My interest is to understand how instruments work, so that I can better control the sound that I can get. Duplicating every nuance of a maker's style doesn't interest me as an end in itself, though as an occasional study it is invaluable. Depending on the particular tonal question that I want to probe, I may change rib-heights, archings or f-hole layout as my curiosity leads me. However, I do try to make everything look of-a-piece, so that sometimes I'll do a "light" look, with sweeping corners with delicate edges and chamfers. Another time, starting perhaps with an earthy looking piece of poplar, I'll go for a more massive, robust look, or I'll do an "urgent" versus a "refined" finish.
For viola I do my own model. Experimenting with violas, where the compromises between tone and dimensions are relatively large, is a great way to get a feel for how an instrument works. I've recently been doing a series of instruments, making string and body length the main variables, while keeping the c-bout, f-hole layout and arching as consistent as possible. I found that convention is right, and larger instruments do sound better. My sense is that string length is more critical than body volume.
What keeps your interest in violinmaking?
For me there are two main areas of interest: function and aesthetics. In the functional area I am concerned with how tone is produced, and with the practicalities of playing and making instruments. To learn about function you study existing instruments, trying to relate the tone that you hear to the structures and materials that you see. Reading on the science of acoustics helps to build a working mental picture of how instruments work. Doing set-up and adjustments helps understand the musician's needs and problems.
To understand the structural limits of instruments and why they fail, the best study is to do repair and restoration work. All of this looking and thinking results in more questions, and some possible solutions, at which point you build an instrument and see what you have got.
In the aesthetic area I am interested in what we find attractive and why. Symmetry and purity are attractive; a highly finished instrument which approaches it's ideal conception is arresting. It represents control, and the mastering of chaos, and is reassuring in a way. On the other hand, an instrument with a less refined finish, which reveals the story of the process by which it was formed, can ultimately be more engaging.
Aesthetic tastes change. For example instruments from the early makers were only nominally symmetrical. Their notion of symmetry was informed by what they saw in the natural world. The Machine Age gave us objects whose forms were purer and exactly replicable; variety and small deviations in form became "blemishes." Seeing what machines could do, violin makers found that they could produce machine-like precision using hand tools. In recent years, in a world awash in highly refined mass-produced forms, the pendulum of aesthetic taste has swung again, and we have begun to appreciate the warmth and humanity in individually hand-made items.
One key to aesthetic interest is rhythm and variation. We establish a pattern, say the shape of a scroll, and then enjoy the range that the form can take. Too much conformity is boring, but too much variety and too little control is chaotic and unsettling. It is interesting to look at the work of masters who produce "rough" work, where lines break around curves, and sweeping tool marks have been left plain to see. For a long time I assumed that these were the result of working fast for economic reasons, but my own experience working fast has shown me that that it takes so little extra work with a scraper to get a "finished" surface, that this rough work must have resulted either from indifference -- perhaps the maker's main interest was tone rather than finish -- or through choice, where the maker enjoyed the texture and drama of visible toolwork, in much the way that some artists like a "brushy" approach to painting.
What single piece of advice would you give to an aspiring maker?
I'd like to make a pitch for instrument diversity - only do enough straight copying to understand the design problems and learn the aesthetic vocabulary; then relax and make your own inquiries. ###
ed. note - Interested readers can find much more about Andrew Carruthers' instruments and restoration work on his beautiful and detailed website: www.andrewcarruthers.com