The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a professional luthier. Makes violins, violas, cellos, all in the style of the Master, old Stradivarius from Cremona, Italy back in the 1600’s into the 1700’s. Once I asked if he ever made instruments out of other woods than the ones Stradivarius used, almost all fiddle back maple and spruce top, maybe even dye them blue for an eye catching effect … and I got this look you’d give a kid who had just asked something so incredibly stupid but don’t want to hurt the little fellas feelings too much. “No,” he told me, “I’m trying to sell these things. You think somebody in a large orchestra is going to want a violin made out of plywood or painted orange? They want a Stradivarius. Or one that has the same exact dimensions and hopefully the same sound.”

Now understand, I was just embarking on a quixotic journey into amateur luthiery myself. I started with banjos but eventually I slipped into guitar making. Trouble with me is, number one, I didn’t plan on selling them and number two, being a so-called artist, I didn’t plan on setting up an assembly line to make multiple copies of the same damn instrument. But yeah, I understood what he was telling me, I just couldn’t apply it to myself.

“So you’re telling me every violinist in the world really wants the same violin?” And apparently, with minor variations, this is true. It would be as if every client of mine looking for a stained glass window insisted that the one I made back in the beginning, nice as it might be, was what they wanted for their very own bathroom. Same color, same design, looked good then, looks good now. How soon can I deliver that thing?

This, I think, is the curse of success. It induces imitation, repetition, redundancy and finally a constraint on innovation or creativity. My fiddler isn’t trying to reinvent the instrument, he’s trying to sell the damn thing. My guitars, well, they’re no doubt unsalable. But they are unique. Idiosyncratic, maybe even a little on the insane side. Sound holes on the side, double holes on top, art deco details, different woods on every one. And no, they aren’t Stradivariuses. And no way is our fiddler going to make a blue one….

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