Sound Samples The purpose of this particular page is to offer you "sonic snippettes" of various instruments which I have made or restored, to give you a brief taste of each. Mostly, one of my gracious friends or relatives will have done the playing. The point for offering this page here was to give you an idea of the sound these instruments. Where I have used a complete track or piece of music from either a commercial recording or one I made in my music room, I identify the player, the instrument, and the label (if there is one). I only lift tracks from commercial recordings in which I know my instruments were used. All the violins were recorded using the same setup, settings, and positioning. Having such a set up allows you to hear the actual differences between the instruments. This first sound sample is of a Taskin Harpsichord I made in 1998. My brother, Robert Hill, plays this wonderful arrangement he made of Bach's D minor Violin Partita for Harpsichord. This movement is the Sarabande from that Partita. This performance is available from Amazon.com on Hänßler Edition under the title: Transcriptions. I especially love the Chaconne on this recording. Click here for the Sound Sample of Opus 320 Marianne Ploger has a way of understanding music that makes each performance she presents extremely moving for me. This homegrown recording of Chopin will give you an idea of what I mean. The piano, one I built 1997 for my brother, Robert, is a 6 and 1/2 octave Viennese Fortepiano patterned after several Graf pianos made around 1815. Click here to hear Marianne Ploger play Chopin on my Opus 311. The violin in this next recording is my opus 368, made in 2003. It was fashioned after the tonal ideals of Guarneri "del Jesu" as embodied in one of his violins built in 1734, known as the "Gibson". Every instrument I have built in the last 30 years has been another step in my quest to duplicate the knowledge of acoustics which the greatest instrument makers of the 17th and 18th centuries possessed. My reasoning is simple. Since copying the instruments of the past has proven, and continues to prove, to be an abject failure, despite the occasional happy accident, I felt it would be more productive to aim at the knowledge those great instrument makers possessed which allowed them to produce one masterpiece after another, after another. At the time I heard and studied the acoustics of the "Gibson" Guarneri, it was owned by Ruggerio Ricci. He was kind enough to allow me access to his treasure in order to determine its acoustical design. Interestingly, the acoustical design of his Guarneri was virtually identical to that of the 1741 Guarneri in the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, the main differences between them being the precise frequencies of the top and back and the blatant asymmetries of the Dearborn instrument. It has taken me 25 years of constant experimentation to begin to understand the work of this particular maker. The violinist is Mauricio Aguiar, a member of the first violin section of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Click here to listen to Opus 368 The next violin, my opus 379, was made in 2004. It too is based on the Guarneri "del Jesu" sound ideal. The main difference between this violin and No. 368 is that I learned something more about the acoustics of varnish. Another interesting difference is that this violin has not been played-in, whereas Opus 368 has been played-in for a year. Playing a violin in results in a more integrated, smoother, more flexible, deeper, more dimensional sound. Click here to hear a Sound Sample of Opus 379 Opus 376, the violin in the next sample, was built with the same acoustical concepts and techniques as 379. The main differences are the result of the differences in wood and that 376 has been played-in for a year. Click here to Listen to Opus 376 This next instrument, my Opus 371, made in 2003/4 reflects the acoustical thinking of Carlo Bergonzi. This violin has a more refined structure to the sound, one that is typical of the violins of Stradivarius, with whom it is thought Bergonzi worked for a time. Where the Stradivari influence produces a kind of velvety "super-violin" sound, the Guarneri "del Jesu" acoustical design aims at producing a voice-like sound as much as possible. Both ways of doing things are valid, though different. My preference is for what imitates as closely as possible the sound of the human voice. Click here to hear this short recording of Opus 371. Robert Hill is the performer in this next recording on my Lute Haprishcord or Lautenwerk. I built this instrument in 1994 for him as an experiment. Robert has three or four recordings on several labels in which he used this particular instrument. I have seen them for sale on Amazon.com. Click here for a Tonal tidbit of Opus 291. Finally, the next two Samples are of the sound of a Lute which I made in 2003. The Player is Tim Burris, currently a resident of Great Diamond Island, Maine, near Portland. These recordings were made during a concert. The first piece he plays is a Galliard by Rosseter. The second is a Passacaglia by Piccinini. Click here for a taste of my Lute, Opus 358 Click here for another taste of my Lute, Opus 358