Not many people make instruments by hand anymore. Cheap instruments from China, Korea and Eastern Europe flood the market. Machine-made, and often constructed from plywood, these instruments are churned out by the thousands. Compare this to a handmade violin which takes about 600 hours of painstaking work to complete and you might begin to get an idea of the difference in quality.

Herold Mueller, a Polish immigrant and retired millwright has been making instruments (cellos, violins and violas) in a studio of his Lakeview Heights home for the last 25 years or so. His first instrument was a cello. Playing on an old, terrible Chinese cello, and unable to afford a better one, he decided to make himself one. Necessity being the mother of invention, he studied the cello, measured it, figured out how it worked, and referred to a few books on the subject. He obtained wood cheaply from work and he made most of the tools he needed.

“The first one didn’t turn out too well,” remembers Herold. He didn’t give up and went on to make several more cellos. Some turned out well and some ended up in the dump. What was the difference between the ones he kept and the ones he destroyed? “The sound, the sound,” he says with feeling. The music is what matters in the end. He now realizes that he should have started out making violins. “It’s basically the same instrument but smaller,” using that much less labour and materials. Herold doesn’t make many cellos anymore. “It takes a lot of digging,” he says, “and I have a bit of a shoulder problem.”

The digging he refers to is the gouging and chiseling of the wood from a thick slab into the fine, tapered top and bottom of the finished instrument. The wood, after being carved to an exact thickness, sometimes measured in thousandths of an inch, is actually tuned like a string to a specific note; a delicate operation vital to the final performance of the instrument. “Each piece of wood is different and needs to be treated differently,” explains Herold.

Herold Mueller, at age 77, continues to make and repair violins and violas, most of which are sold locally, often to students who’ve outgrown their beginner instruments. Many of his fine, one of a kind violins come with a name: Cinderella, Brown Sugar, The Nightingale. Made of shimmering bird’s eye or flamed maple, spruce, ebony or boxwood, with long, delicate necks, hand-carved scrolls, and backs decorated with inlaid perfoling, these beauties await skilled, and lucky, hands to give them a voice and make their creator very happy.

“Making instruments is a lifetime apprenticeship,” says Mr. Mueller. “Just when you think you’ve learned everything, you find there’s more to learn.”