{"id":14093,"date":"2018-02-23T05:30:25","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T10:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14093"},"modified":"2018-02-06T08:26:01","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T13:26:01","slug":"jack-devereux-strings-of-life-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/02\/23\/jack-devereux-strings-of-life-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Devereux: Strings of Life (Part Three)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

The Cult of Old Wood<\/b>
\nA violin maker can’t simply drive to the nearest lumber yard for wood. Devereux explains that the raw material \u2013 maple for the sides and back, spruce for the top \u2013 is milled specifically for violins, and is sourced from Eastern Europe, the foot of the Alps toward Italy. <\/p>\n

\u201cBuilders get really specific about density and weight; you can measure the way that sound passes through a certain piece of wood,\u201d he says. And then there’s age. \u201cThe newest wood you could put on a fiddle has been out of the tree for maybe five to seven years,\u201d Devereux says. \u201cI just bought a back that’s probably been out of the tree for maybe 60, 70 years. And it’s going to sit there; I’m going to wait on that for something special.\u201d<\/p>\n

Devereux recounts an in-joke among fiddle makers. \u201cOld violin makers save their best wood until they die. Then the widow gets fifteen phone calls: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. You wanna sell some wood?’\u201d But like so many issues surrounding fiddle-making, there’s disagreement as to the importance of aged wood. \u201cThe most expensive violin in the world right now is a Giuseppe Guarneri that sold for something like $18 million and change,\u201d Devereux says. \u201cAnd if you look at the wood he used, some of it was two or three years old.\u201d <\/p>\n

But people do like their mystique. \u201cI feel like every six months, NPR will do a story on ‘The Secret of the Old Violins,’\u201d Devereux chuckles. \u201cAnd a lot of all that is b.s.: the way the wood was processed, and if it was cut by a virgin on a night with a full moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Big Payoff <\/b>
\nIt’s difficult to pin Devereux down as to how long it takes to build a fiddle, start-to-finish. He says that the woodworking phase often runs a month or more. But the varnishing stage \u201chas a mind of its own\u201d and could be two weeks, a month, or more. And while in an ideal world, he’d like to be building 10-12 instruments a year, with his Town Mountain performance commitments in 2016 he managed roughly half that number. To date, he says he’s completed and delivered more than 30 instruments.<\/p>\n

Whenever possible, Devereux strongly prefers to hand-deliver a finished fiddle to its new owner. But because he’s attracted the attention of musicians across the globe, that’s not always possible. \u201cI’ve got a handful of instruments in Europe now,\u201d he says, \u201cand delivering those is always tricky: customs, transcontinental shipping, import taxes and so on.\u201d In those cases, he tries to hand the violin off to a trusted friend or associate who’s headed that way.<\/p>\n

Devereux admits that the practice of presenting a finished instrument is sometimes bittersweet. By that point, he’s already logged quite a bit of time playing and adjusting that fiddle himself. And at the moment, he doesn’t even own one of his own creations. \u201cI keep meaning to build myself something,\u201d he says. In the meantime, he sometimes borrows back one of his violins for special occasions. <\/p>\n

After giving away his earliest models, Devereux’s first sale was to a good friend and former Berklee classmate who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He had been playing what Devereux describes as a \u201cdirtbag instrument; he had no money.\u201d But he wanted one of Devereux’s fiddles, and insisted on paying for it, telling the fiddle maker, \u201cIf you’re going to do this, be serious about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe instrument should act as a conduit from the mind of the player,\u201d Devereux says. And part of his goal as an instrument maker is to make that connection as invisible as possible. \u201cWhen someone’s playing one of my fiddles,\u201d he offers, \u201cI don’t want them to be thinking about the instrument.\u201d Devereux does that thinking when he’s building.<\/p>\n

And for him, the payoff comes when he strings up a finished fiddle. Devereux says that he’s always excited to discover, \u201cwhen you flip the switch, does the monster comes alive?\u201d He readily admits that he’s a nerd when it comes to instrument making. \u201cI just love reading about it, and trying to go hang out with these old fiddlers and talk to the guys who know more than I do. I really like getting into the nuts and bolts of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked what surprises him the most about his work, he has a ready answer. \u201cPeople keep ordering fiddles!\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, my website’s a disaster, and I’ve done no advertising. It’s miraculous; I have a waiting list.\u201d Because of the time involved, he only builds on commission; there’s no stock room full of fiddles in Jack Devereux’s shop. \u201cI would like eventually to get maybe three, four ahead,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

While he’s receptive to creating instruments that meet the specific desires of his clients, Devereux admits that he really wants to do things his way. Though he insists he’s been fortunate never to find himself in this position, he knows of other fiddle makers who have encountered customers seeking a \u201cmagic bullet,\u201d a violin that will magically make them a better player. \u201cLuckily,\u201d he says, \u201cpeople seem to like the stuff that I like to make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two… The Cult of Old Wood A violin maker can’t simply drive to the nearest lumber yard for wood. Devereux explains that the raw material \u2013 maple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[237,3334,3335],"class_list":["post-14093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americana","category-interview","tag-asheville","tag-jack-devereux","tag-town-mountain","cat-6-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14093"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14103,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093\/revisions\/14103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}