Update and recap

My main research is done!   It’s time to head back into the workshop and put the results to work making instruments.  

I started asking ‘can you make and design violins today using entirely methods from Old Cremona?’ and ‘how would you?’ back around 2009.  I started by exploring what others had already figured out.  I found that many people – particularly Sacconi, Hargrave, Denis, and Coates – had already paved the way, clarifying many points.  But still there were large gaps in the knowledge you would need to build this way. My questions pulled me into independent research about eight years ago. My explorations kept expanding, taking more and more of my time.  In the last three years, I laid aside making to focus my efforts on the research.  I decided not to make again until my research results essentially gave a complete picture of classical making design methods in every instrument feature.

Now that I’m closing out the research and heading on into making, some sort of recap to summarize and update seems appropriate for this blog. 

Revival Methods - David of Santa Barbara Mission Statement

I put this together recently. It's a summary of my aims. I wrote this partly as a mission state for myself, and partly as a draft of something to show to anyone who wants to know a bit more about my work.

The familiar modern approach to violin making is to 'copy' classic Italian instruments. People talk about making a 'Del Gesu Cannone', a copy of Paganini's Guarneri violin. So my approach of 'reviving classical methods' runs against the current norms.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to communicate a sense of the why and how of my work without asking people to read a few hundred pages of research.