Keith Hill - Instrument Maker

United States

“In order to assess tone properly, a player usually must have a keen musical instinct developed from long years of experience in playing a stringed instrument and also hearing many instruments played by others. Tone tastes vary. Some prefer soprano brilliance while others favor darker alto tonal shades. The basic requirements for tone are an easy and responsive speaking voice, carrying quality, equal sound volume on all four strings, and agreeable tone color. This formula is the essence of normal judgment in the selection and valuation of an instrument regardless of its age or original derivation.” By and large, players develop a keen musical instinct through years of experience because it usually takes time to come to a clear sense of what to look for when listening to and judging instruments. The reason it takes time is three fold. One: We are usually not taught how to evaluate instruments so we rely on our preferences. That is, we either like it or we don’t like it. Two: We have no guides or specific things to be aware of when we are actively evaluating an instrument. Or the criteria and standards we have with which to evaluate an instrument are either inadequate or deficient. Three: We hold views or notions about instruments, which are false, only because everyone else is holding those views. This prejudices us and makes truly judging musical instruments extremely difficult. What follows are my own criteria for judging bowed stringed instruments, although they apply as well to harpsichords, clavichords, and fortepianos. These criteria come from direct observation of the sound of great antique violins, pianos, harpsichords, and organs. I am proposing to take each criterion and discuss its exact opposite...what you don't hear on great instruments but what you definitely do hear on those that might otherwise be mistaken as being good instruments but which are in reality mediocre I will also, where possible, discuss the specific causes for the good qualities that we hear and the causes for the bad traits, but without belaboring the discussion with technical jargon. Below is the my list of qualities, traits, properties and characteristics of great instruments. My discussion of each of these you can find at the end of the list. 1. Carrying Power - to completely fill a very large hall 2. Projection of tone - the sound goes out to the listener 3. Great Volume - to play concertos with a large ensemble 4. Ease of Response - ready to sound at the will of the player 5. Balance of sound across the strings 6. Directness of sound - to create the feeling of immediacy in the sound 7. Evenness of sound up and down the fingerboard 8. Depth of tone - to create the effect of Paradox 9. Intense Resonance - to fully support the softest sound produced 10. Clarity of tone - to be easily heard in a complex texture 11. Penetration of tone over large distances without loss of quality 12. Breadth of tone - to surround the ears of each listener 13. Flexibility of response -reflects the bow's slightest motion 14. Subtlety of tone - mirrors the soul of the player 15. Brilliance - to excite or stir the listener 16. Color - conveys every timbre and affect intended by the player 17. Tonal Reserve - a sound that keeps on giving, never caving in 18. Strong Sensation of Pitch - makes playing in-tune easy 19. Ringing tone - gives the effect that the instrument is singing 20. Intensity of tone - creates a feeling that the instrument is alive 21. Sweetness of tone - to gratify the player as well as the listener 22. Focused or Centered tone - creates a solid core to the sound 23. Buoyancy of tone - a lightness of effect...the sound floats 24. Velvetiness - the effect that the sound is integrated and smoothly blended 25. Resiliency of tone - sound appears to bounce, when needed 26. Stability of tone - the tonepitch holds steady on long slow bow strokes 27. Personality - the voice of the instrument feels human 28. Fullness of tone - the ears and mind are filled with the sound 29. Strength of timbre - the sound color is clear and powerful 30. Ease of producing harmonics

Over the last 43 years, I have made 57 clavichords. Yet, of all the keyboard instruments I have made, it was the search for how to make a good clavichord that was the most elusive. One would think all you have to do is make a rectangular box, insert a keyboard, soundboard and strings, then add the tangents and you have a clavichord. Its a nice thought as long as you don't care a whit how the result sounds or plays. When I play the antique clavichords, I am struck by how sophisticated they sound and play, especially the "Bauerninstrumenten", clavichords made in the winter by farmers to keep themselves occupied. The same cannot be said of most clavichords made since 1900 as their effect is decidedly underwhelming. They either sound like a box of rubber bands and feel squishy, like playing on sponges, or they sound like a bad harpsichord with almost no sound and what sound there is has no dynamic properties. At their very best, clavichords should have the sound of thought. If this idea is new to you, focus for a while on your own thoughts and calculate how "loud" they are. Thought sounds extremely intense when empassioned with meaning. Thought ranges in volume from the faintest whisper to the loudest conceivable energy level. It is a paradox because the clavichord is almost dismissively soft even when played loudly...but then, as you will have concluded from your brief experience with thinking this way, only we alone can hear our own thoughts. Thought changes in affect according to what is being thought about, and sings irrepressibly when moved by love or enchantment. It is for this reason that I place the quality of being enchanting as foremost of all qualities that a clavichord should have. Though not always an obvious quality, enchantment has the power to make us want to play the instrument every time we come near the instrument...like a subtle compulsion. It is what I aim for in each clavichord I build.

Those of you who have followed my progress in violin making will finally be rewarded here with a new set of recordings. I had them made because I felt I had reached a milestone in my violin making that established a new much higher standard of sound quality that can be heard among all 11 different violins I have recently finished. Does this mean I have "arrived". Not at all. I, above all, needed to compare how my violin sound was stacking up against really fine 18th century Cremonese violin sounds. I wanted to know in which direction I need to go from this point on. And, to my great pleasure, that direction has been clearly and successfully given by the old masters. Here, just below, are all of the new recordings made on these my new instruments listed by opus number. And, as you scroll down the following text you will come to the various recordings of antiques compared to the sounds of these violins along with photos of each of my instruments. Op. 4 2 5 Played by Mary Grace Johnson - Paganini - Cantabile

Over the last 30 years I have regularly made both five octave and six and one half octave fortepianos and altogether have made more than 21 fortepianos. The models which I offer were selected on the basis of how well, in my judgment, the original maker solved all of the problems of physical design, functional design, and acoustical design. The action had to work smoothly and reliably under every manner of touch. It had to feel light yet secure. It had to function silently. It had to feel positive yet supple. The instrument had to hold its tuning for an extended period of time without being overbuilt. It had to be easy to get the action in and out of the keywell. It had to be easy to regulate and adjust; and it had to hold a regulation within a given season. It had to sound firm and resonant without sounding harsh or dull. It had to have an extremely full yet singing treble, a colorful and full middle range, and a solid, sonorous bass. It had to be loud enough for concerto playing yet be able to play at a pppp range with relative ease and still have that level of volume project to the end of a large room. Standard with each Fortepiano are: screw-in legs, a music desk, a tuning hammer, muting strips and wedges, and a packet of spare action parts.

I have built six lautenwerks, the designs of which are all completely different. The first lautenwerk I built was made for my brother, Robert Hill, who is the director of the early music program at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany. It is a single manual instrument that has a special pedal mechanism for moving the single 8' set of jacks toward and away from the player, in imitation of what happens when a lutenist changes the position of his right hand from middle of the string to plucking close to the nut, which changes the timbre from flutey to nasal, from dark to bright...however you want to call it. I also wanted to make the sound as much like a lute sound as possible. Robert has made a number of recordings of the music of Bach believed to have been written for lautenwerk. In one review of his recording, the reviewer commented that the instrument sounded more like a lute than most lutes sound. Its is a wonderful compliment even though I don't agree with it. To me it sounds like a lautenwerk should...very lute-like but clearly not a lute... cool sounding yet neither cold nor dull, but spritely, sweetly singing even though the gut strings are far more attenuated than the metal strings of a harpsichord. The sound sample below demonstrates how the timbre changing pedal mechanism allows the color to be different on repeats without resorting to another keyboard to do the same thing.

After 40 years of making musical instruments professionally, I still have not acquired any special taste for a particular design or style of harpsichord making. As long as an instrument sounds fantastic and inspires a wealth of musical ideas, it pleases me. However, in the last few years, I have found some designs more enjoyable to make than others. These are what I have included in this catalogue. My reasons for making these selections are: That the originals are relatively free of mechanical and aesthetic defects and are of exceedingly high musical quality. And that certain designs, the originals of which are not playing or the sound of which has been destroyed during restoration, nevertheless, produce compelling and interesting musical results.