| Woodsound
Studio grew out of my passion for music and fine musical
instruments. It comprises is a collection of various interesting
pieces, from a retail store where we display the fruit of our labor
to the the heart of the operation: the repair and restoration rooms
along with my personal passion, the new instrument construction
rooms. Woodsound Studio is unusual in the stringed instrument world
in that we work with both orchestral and fretted instruments. We
do any and all forms of restoration, performed in the most artistic
manner, for both platforms.
 Hello,
my name is Ron Pinkham. I am a native and lover of the state of
Maine. When I began my musical career as a youth playing the violin,
I was one of the few in rural Vermont at that time, where my father
was a pastor. As my interest in the violin waned, my family moved
to Boston, and I was thrust into a new melieu: the coffee house,
where I spent the obligatory year playing bongo and listening
to poetry, Flamenco of the late beat generation and the emerging
folk boom. I switched to the flamenco guitar as a choosen instrument,
and that evolved into my love for classical guitar. Music has
always been with me, and that led me toward a career in performance
and teaching for the classical guitar. My formal training began
in the middle 1960s in the Boston area and continued with Manual
Ramos in Mexico City and later with the Romereo
family in southern California, where I attended the
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Upon completion of my formal studies in 1975 I left southern
California, $3000 in hand, looking for my concert guitar. I traveled
all over America in my trusty VW looking in classical guitar shops
in all the major cities I could drive to in my homeward meanderings.
I was disappointed with the guitars I found, predominantly due
to their lack of balance. Knowing the life of the road to be a
hard one, I decided against a career as a road musician and returned
to my hometown of Lincolnville, Maine, where I embarked on a career
as a teacher and builder-restorer of stringed instruments. After
a few years of repair work and new guitar development, I saw new
opportunites to expand my business into orchestral instrument
work. My special new love was l’archet, the orchestral bow,
right-hand magic for the violin family.
Woodsound Studio began in my living room, where I lived and breathed
instruments until the business outgrew my home and moved to its
first building on the family land. A couple of years later I was
invited to open in the nearby town of Camden. Our name spread
and the business grew. Eventually I was offered the opportunity
to build our current 4,200-square-foot home in a commercial district
on U.S. Route 1. We moved to this location in 1989. The Woodsound
building lies nestled in the hillside above Clam Cove in the hamlet
of Glen Cove, a small seaside borough of Rockport,
Maine.
The first floor comprises the showrooms, where we display and
sell restored vintage instruments, new fretted and orchestral
stringed instruments and bows. Also on the first floor are the
teaching studios and office. The second floor houses the heart
of the operation, a workshop where we do repair and restoration
work, a very well-equiped central machine room and rough-out area,
and a new instrument assembly and humidity control room for glue
up and humidity-sensitive repairs.
While most shops specialize in either
repairs or new instrument construction, either fretted or orchestral
instruments, we do both, including bow work. We own well over 200
instruments of all quality ranges, student to advanced professional
level. In the summer we are the shop of choice for  many
of the world-class professionals who come to Maine to play at the
Bay
Chamber Concerts, Kneisel
Hall (Julliard Summer), Bowdoin
Summer Festival, and the Pierre
Monteux School of Conducting. We regularly see and
maintain old Italian, French, and German orchestral masterpieces
and fretted instruments from around the world. Visit the Repair
& Restorations pages.
The art and history of the guitar
and violin families have sustained and fulfilled my need to constantly
learn and to use the musical ear I have developed through years
as a practicing musician and teacher. My fascination with the
guitar has remained strong, and I have developed a number of designs
for both new classical and steel string guitars. In additon I
build a number of the traditional forms and brace patterns. Learn
more about this in the Instruments
We Build pages.
John Blodgett
John has been at Woodsound Studio since 1990 and he heads
the Repair and Restoration department of the shop.
He began exploring musical instruments by building dulcimers
while attending Hobart College, from which he graduated in 1979.
In 1980-81 he attended Boston University’s Program in Artisanry,
where he studied Historical Stringed Instrument Making under noted
viol and lute maker Donald Warnock. There, he received a solid
foundation in traditional instrument-making techniques and the
use of traditional materials, which has served him well over the
years. John continued to gain experience while restoring antique
furniture at Abacus Antiques in Newbury, Massachusetts. Later
moving to Amherst he began working at Fretted Instrument Workshop.
In John’s tenure at Woodsound, as well as during his previous
work, he has seen and worked on an incredibly wide variety of
instruments—the finest violins, violas and cellos, vintage
Martin guitars and Gibson mandolins, banjos of all sorts—literally
any instrument with strings. John believes there is something
to be learned from every specimen that crosses his workbench,
and through his exposure to all these he has continued to hone
his skills and deepen his insights into the mysteries of what
it is that makes a fine musical instrument.
John builds a variety of mandolin family instruments: carved-top
mandolins, mandolas, octave-mandolins, and citterns, all of his
own design; designs that are informed by his broad exposure to
instruments from the past but which also incorporate modern elements
and contemporary understandings of acoustics.
John is a woodworker and craftsman in the broadest sense of the
word. Whether it is cutting firewood, designing and building his
house, restoring his classic 24' sailboat, or all the way to restoring
the finest old violins or cellos, guitars or mandolins, John brings
his vast experience, his inventiveness and insight to the work
at hand.
Read about Blodgett
mandolins in the Instruments
We Build pages.
Ryan Condon
Ryan Condon grew up in Maine. He likes music, playing guitar,
and human rights. He also likes Zeppelin and a good murder ballad,
but lately has found an appreciation for Norman Blake and music
steeped in that old-timey tradition. In his eight years of training
at Woodsound under John  and
Ron, he has learned about guitar construction and repair and orchestral
repair, and has seen and worked on many different fine old instruments
that have come through the shop.
He enjoys seeing innovation in the instrument world and looks
forward to trying his own and other people’s different ideas
on what a guitar could and/or should be in the future. He got
into instrument making because he couldn’t afford the guitar
he wanted on his cook’s salary and decided that it sounded
like a good idea to try and make his dream guitar. He has built
many guitars under Ron’s tutelage as well as a couple for
himself (a More Condon, Les Paul—get it? and one of Ron’s
LPs). At the moment he is working on an arch-top guitar of his
own design, which came about because he thinks f-holes on a guitar
look pretty cool, and it’s something new to him.
Ryan plays guitar and sings pretty well and likes a wide variety
of music.
What is the Fine Art of Luthierie?
A
Luthier (from the old French for lute maker) is a maker and/or
restorer of acoustic stringed instruments. Some luthiers specialize
in work on fretted instruments—guitar, mandolin, lute, etc.—while
others concentrate on the bowed orchestral instruments—violin,
viola, cello, bass. A luthier may also specialize in the making
and restoring of bows. In our shop, different members of our staff
specialize in each of these areas while being proficient in them
all.
Our goal over the years has consistently
been to apply the highest standards of craftsmanship to each project
we undertake. A few of our most interesting projects are profiled
in these pages.
My Goals as a Luthier
When I started my quest as a luthier, it was as a young man trying
to produce an instrument with exceptional balance, power and a
warm brilliant sound, something I couldn't find when I left school.
Repairs though, were the bread and butter of life, and my only
goal was to do it better, make it play and sound at an optimum,
so anyone could learn more easily. A beginner does not need an
instrument with world-class sound, although that would be nice.
What they need, is an instrument that plays like a professional’s.
Being a long-time teacher and player of classical guitar, I believe
playability and balance are everything.
I suppose my parents’ moto of “Good, better, best,
never let it rest, 'til your good is better and your better is
best” has been my approach to all things in life and is
well suited to the demands of the precise building and restoration
skills needed for the fine art of lutherie. As a young man I did
it again and again, if it wasn't right, I did it over until it
was and the skill was mastered. You will see that skill in all
the work we do at Woodsound Studio, from beginner- to master-level
instrument.
| | | |
| |
| |
|
