Fiddle
Player & Master Craftsman
Herb Brown
Herbie Brown is my grandmother Eliza's brother. This article appeared in his local paper.
FINE TUNING - HERBERT BROWN
By Jean Shea
HARRISBURG, SD - On the outskirts of this small community, in a ranch-style stone house, landscaped with antelope antlers and wagon wheels, Herbert Brown practices a time-honored craft.Brown, musician, craftsman, and retired employee of Hassenstein Steel, works 10 hours a day crafting maple wood and ebony into violins.
“I call them fiddles,” says the 71-year-old man whose humble face is matched by a voice with a country timbre.
Brown considers himself a fiddle maker, not a violinmaker; a fiddler, not a violinist, because that is how he knows the instrument.
But once inside his garage-turned-workshop, Brown calls the instruments in various stages of completions violins. He points to the features on one of his creations that distinguishes it as a Stradivarius violin and talks about his education in violin-making as having strong Amati influence.
Stradivarius and Amati designs are the two designs of violins considered the standards for today that were developed by the Italian families of the same names in the early 1700s.
Brown’s own country band, the Westernaieres, played for benefits, socials, and on the radio in earlier years. In 1963, the governor selected him to represent South Dakota in a national fiddling contest. He placed fourth.
He learned to play the fiddle from his father. And, like the Stradivarius and Amatis, violin making was handed down from father to son.
It began in the fall of 1936, when Brown helped his father graduate, that is rebuild, a violin. It was doing that kind of work that Brown learned through the years to craft a fiddle into a fine instrument rather than a homemade saw-and-pick affair.
“You should repair and fix violins for about 10 years before you even begin to make them,” Brown says.
Having been at it for about fifty years, Brown is qualified by his own standards. He has repaired violins for a fiddler from Orlando, FL, as well as area fiddlers. He just finished a fiddle for Kenny Putnam, a former area fiddler who now plays in Roy Clark’s band.
“Everybody says you should learn to make violins just like old masters,” Brown says. “But if Henry Ford never went beyond the Model T, we’d all still be driving Model T’s”
Brown’s fiddle has a longer neck, which expands the range of play about another octave, he says. The upper right quadrant of the fiddle’s how body has been cut away – in a suitably aesthetic fashion – to allow the fingers to move more easily down that part of the fingerboard that extends into the instrument’s body. He also changed the shape of the f-hole in the body to enhance the quality of the tone.
Putnam will receive a Brown-designed fiddle, and his boss, Roy Clark, also is interested in the instrument, Brown says.
Brown’s violins begin as rough yelow-white planks of bird’s eye maple wood and gray-black strips of ebony, a rock-hard wood imported from India.
Brown initially cuts out the pieces with electric saws, but finishes the work by hand. Thin strips of ebony and hollywood are inlaid along the edges of the body and pegboard. The beryl sections of maplewood are stained with a reddish brown stain which he makes, to give the wood a marble-like appearance.
When finished, usually five weeks after the first piece of wood is cut, his creations leave the workshop as lightweight, finely scrolled, highly polished violins, priced at about $5,000.
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