Tour Our Studio

Woodsound Studio has grown from its start in 1975 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 as well as new fretted and orchestral stringed instruments and their bows. We own over 200 instruments in both orchestral and fretted instrument categories from beginner to master quality ranges including early American fretted, and German, French, and Italian orchestral masterpieces and of course the fine instruments we build here at Woodsound Studio.

Views of the repair/restoration room showing a few of the many instruments awaiting their turn on the bench.

The second story houses the repair/restoration workshop, a very well-equiped central machine room and rough-out area, and a new instrument assembly and humidity controled room for glue up and humidity-sensitive repairs as well as wood stacks.

Our repair department does all manner of fretted and orchestral instrument repair and restoration. We are a very unusual shop in that we work on both fretted and orchestral instruments. In the old European tradition many luthiers’ shops produced all kinds of stringed instruments, including lutes and guitars, so it was not unusual for a luthier to have such a broad range of interests. This being Maine, a very rural state with a small population, a broad range was necessary for survival as well.

Our location here in Rockport has been intrinsicly connected to the Bay Chamber Concerts and the many world-class performers they have brought to our area. Those players, such as Marc Johnson, have come to trust and rely on our restoration services as well as fretted players across New England, such as Don McLean, Gordon Bok, and other notable players such as Fareed Haque.

We have all of the major tools found in a modern woodworking shop (including a dupe carver and thickness sander), and although we do a large amount of work by hand, we also recognize that in today’s world machine-assisted work can save a great deal of time.


Rough-out bench and to the right rear our duplicating carver.	Some of our general woodworking machines, jigs, and fixtures.

A view into the new construction humidity-controlled room. Here is where all humidity-sensitive repairs as well as glue-ups of new instrument parts take place.

Here we see one of our vacuum tables in the new construction room. These tables allow us to glue bracing with uniform pressure at 1800 pounds per square foot. The vinyl template in the vacuum table locates braces and keeps them from slipping in the glue-up process.

All new instrument construction and critical repair assemblies are done in our humidity-controlled room to ensure optimal conditions for the highest quality results. Wood storage is also located in the humidity-controlled room.

Some of the woods aging in our humidity-controlled room. Seen here are koa, ebony, mahogany, Brazilian rosewood, and maple cello backs and spruce tops.