Welcome!

Welcome to my luthier blog, an offshoot of the floating violinist! The point of starting a new blog is simply to keep all my nerdy career writing contained so that people who only want to read about my personal life and adventures can stay on the floating violinist and not bother with chisels and sandpaper and f holes (and those who only want to read about what I’m learning at luthier school can stick to this blog, and not have to bother with things like curtains and lemon pepper bread and cow-clouds) And needless to say, those who want to stalk my life in its entirety can just keep up with both blogs.

I think of my luthier world as a little bit like leading a superhero life. Not many people do it, or even think about instrument repair on a daily basis, so when I first tell people what I do, they are mostly surprised and interested and have no idea what it involves. I spend the day sharpening chisels and being a glasses-wearing, coffee-drinking, knife-welding superhero, and then return to my normal life where no one knows that I have the coolest career ever, unless I tell them.

When we are young, we all have a dream of what we want to be when we grow up. An astronaut, cop, fireman, teacher. People who know me pretty well know or assume that I’ve wanted to do music my whole life. But before my whole life (before age 11) I wanted to be a surgeon. (there was also a brief intermission of criminal justice thrown in there that lasted about a semester – I blame it on the napoleon complex, I really just wanted to carry a gun and be taken seriously. But I digress.)

I wanted to be a surgeon, when I was very young. Then I wanted to be a violin teacher. Then I wanted to be a violin performer. Then I went back to wanting to be a surgeon – this time, a string instrument surgeon. What all of that turned out to be was just a large enjoyment of fixing things and making them better, and therefore making people happy.

Luthiery is very much like a mix between being a doctor and an auto mechanic. Fortunately, if you make a mistake in “operating” on an instrument, you can fix it – it may take longer, but if you mess up, you haven’t killed anyone. (this is why I say it’s a safer version of my 5 year old dream)

But, as much as it is like doctoring, it is also very similar to the life of an auto mechanic. With my car trouble and not knowing anything about cars, I found myself on the other side of the counter, feeling strangely like the customers I had helped every day at the violin shop. This complex piece of technology that I use every day and can’t live without has suddenly started doing something funny that I don’t understand.

Violinists and car-owners take their expensive and complex technology to a shop where people know about those things. The instrument owners don’t know what's wrong, or if they do, they generally have no idea the steps to fix it. They only hope that the repair person is 1. Good at what they do, and 2. Won’t screw them over and charge them for things they don’t need, or charge them too much too much for the things they do need. There is a lot of trust required of this instrument and car owner.

So. Here’s what I do. I’m in school right now, about two weeks in, learning lots and lots of cool things. I won’t post everything I do on here, but I will keep you up to date with the interesting parts. Stay tuned!