.jpg)
Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference!Join visual artist Pat Benincasa in conversation with a riveting roster of guests to uncover extraordinary stories of everyday people. Listen as they share their quirky wisdom, unlikely adventures, and poignant life lessons! Fasten your emotional seatbelt for this journey of heart, humor and grit!
Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Shaping Sound: The Master Craft of Nina Poots
What happens when wood becomes voice, and craft becomes calling?
Luthier Nina Poots doesn’t just build string instruments—she brings them to life. Born in the Netherlands and now working in the Scottish Highlands, Nina’s journey has taken her from art education to centuries-old violin-making traditions, with stops at Glasgow Clyde College and the renowned Newark School in England.
She reveals how tea leaves and vibration patterns can reveal a violin’s voice, and why building an instrument is as much about listening as it is about shaping. Nina opens up about transformation, trust in the process, and what it means to create something that won’t fully find itself for another fifty years.
This is a story of sound, soul, and the quiet magic of becoming.
Link
Today's episode is brought to you by the Joan of Arc Scroll Medal, a beautiful brass alloy medal, designed by award-winning artist, Pat Benincasa. This uniquely shaped medal is ideal for holiday or as a special occasion gift! Visit www.patbenincasa-art.com
Please Note: The views expressed by our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcaster.
Follow me on Instagram!
Pat:
Fill To Capacity where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.
Pat:
Hi, I am Pat Benincasa and welcome to Fill To Capacity. You know, some days the world feels a little loud, so it's a gift to sit down and talk about the quiet magic of making. Episode #108, "Shaping Sound: The Master Craft of Nina Poots." My guest today, Nina Poots is a luthier whose hands shape more than instruments. They shape legacy, story and sound. Nina, born in the Netherlands, made her way to Scotland, drawn in by the smell of wood shavings and the pull of working with her hands. She trained at Glasgow Clyde College, then earned first class honors at the renowned Newark School of Violin Making in England, a place steeped in old world craft and some serious tradition. Now in the Scottish highlands, Nina builds and restores instruments with care precision and a bit of wonder. She calls herself a proud, sober, extroverted introvert who names her violins after Welsh enchantresses. Nina's story is one of deep listening to wood, to instinct and to her deeper calling. Her work isn't just a skill, it's a vocation. Okay, welcome Nina. So nice to have you here.
Nina:
That's that's quite the intro. Thank you very much for having me .
Pat:
It's well earned. Nina! I'd like to start, can you take us back to that first glimpse into the violin workshop? Right after you bought your double bass, what did you see, smell or feel in that space that told you, oh, this is it, this is my path.
Nina:
Yeah, it was a pretty magical moment. I was, I was very fortunate in my early twenties to coming to some inheritance money. So I was able to buy my own double bass, which when you're that young is pretty wild. And went to a base maker in Holland and he had the classic, like big shop front. So double basses are lining the wall. And I had a couple to try out and then I found my double bass and this was kind of before the whole like banking apps and stuff like that. Internet banking was starting to become a thing and because it was a new customer, it's like, could you pay the whole sum in one go? Well if I can borrow your computer. Sure. So through the shop front we went through the workshop, through his garden into his house to get into the laptop.
Nina:
So that moment of like transitioning from quite a clean and pristine shop front to all of a sudden this chaotic work space, it was just, yeah, pretty enchanting I think is a good way of saying it. Especially with double basses, big instruments. I had several benches and he had multiple projects on the go and he was seeing instruments in different stages of repair. And like you said, the smell of wood shavings. Do you know when you get a visual visceral reaction to stuff and it's just like, oh. And like I was used to some a, a level of creativeness because I was at art school at the time, so I was, and I was becoming a teacher, so I had to know a little bit about everything. 'cause I was doing all these different, different mediums actually. So I, I was familiar with woodworking, but I think this was just like another next level I've come to realize later in life that it's not just a smell of fresh wood, it's also an old instrument. Smells sometimes nice , sometimes not so nice.
Pat:
I can tell you, you walk into my studio, you can always smell freshly cut wood. 'cause I'm building 3D paintings and using the saw. That smell, there's something about it.
Nina:
Because you're used to it now. I'm used to it now, but every time I get someone to come into my workshop, that's one of the first things that I'm like, oh, it smells so great in here.
Pat:
Now you mentioned you trained as an art educator in Amsterdam before moving to Scotland. What did violin making give you that art school didn't?
Nina:
I'd like to say I was 16 when I applied for art school and I was 17 in my first year. I was a very young student and I very much remember feeling really like out of place. 'cause like everyone in my class is significantly older than I was and everyone, because they were a bit older, they had just a different level of skill already because they've had done stuff before. And I was so new to everything. I always felt a bit not good enough I think. But what I really enjoyed, but simultaneously found really difficult in art school, especially because of becoming an educator. Like I said, I had to know a little bit about everything. And it's interesting, one of my lectures during one of our assessments made a comment about every time you start something, I get the sense that you don't stick enough time into it to get really good at it.
Nina:
I was like, okay, I was a, a bit of a master of everything. I took the things very quickly, but then I get bored very quickly as well or I get distracted or whatever. You know, you know, you're 18, you're 19, you're 20, you got other stuff going on in life. It's really interesting to think back about that particular assessment. 'cause it didn't say in like a mean way. It's like, I see a lot there that's not going anywhere just yet. And he himself was a wood whittler. He made spoons and stuff and he, he was always trying to get me to make spoons. Away with your, with your spoons. So finished art school got stuck in a dead end job because Dutch government at the time cut a lot of funding in the art school and education system.
Nina:
So a lot of teachers stayed in place, the job market kind of froze over. I was unemployed for about five months and then ended up in a kind of minimum wage service industry job just to keep myself afloat. And I was, oh Christ, what am I gonna do? I can't do this for like another five years. 'cause I think that was the prognosis of a friend of mine who was in education. She's like, yeah, within the next five years the old guard is kind of retiring. I said, oh my god, five years of service industry until I find a job. From what I've studied for, nope, , I was a musician. I always played bass. I knew a friend of mine was actually a guitar maker. And I just remember hanging out with him being like, how do you, how do you become like a guitar maker?
Nina:
How do you do this? He went a very traditional route, as in he worked for another guitar maker for about 10 years as like an apprentice and then he became self-employed. And he said, there are also schools, 'cause it's quite hard to find luthiers willing to take you under their wing. It's a big commitment, usually pays pretty shit. So he mentioned a couple of schools in Europe. I said, oh, maybe bass making, that sounds fun. I'm a bass player. Maybe start small. There's quite a few schools throughout Europe. I think one of the, the most well-known places everyone to get to is Cremona. That was just outta reach, very expensive. I got a bit of a machismo vibe from it. Germany felt a bit conservative where I was, France, it's really hard to get into. I didn't really speak French. Ended up finding, I think it was Merton College, which is also quite expensive in London. And I remember emailing them being like, Hey, any grants that you can do for European students? And they're like, no! There's this school in Glasgow, Scotland that is free for European students. How great! So I went and looked up and applied and was granted an interview pretty much straight out the gate, which was quite wild.
Pat:
Let me stop you because that was my next question. After you finished your studies, you joined two luthiers at the storybook instrument workshop in Glasgow, a shared space dedicated to building and restoring string instruments. So what happened, I mean, here you end up going there and it sounds like you put a lot of work into finding out what was available, what was out of reach, but you just kept plowing through.
Nina:
Yeah, I think so. I was 24 by the time I decided to uproot life and just go somewhere else without getting too personal. I was, I was very stuck in Holland. A lot of people say, oh, Holland's really nice. Oh, people are lovely. I was like, yeah, we're really nice to tourists. But Dutch people amongst one another, different feel.. And there's the Dutch directness that I think I've always quite struggled with. And for me, it felt there weren't a lot of opportunities in Holland because everyone always felt a bit like, oh, everything has been done before. Like, you couldn't really pitch an idea, or why do you want to become a violin maker? People reacted a bit funny. So I think moving abroad to do that, it was just a kind of a way for me to go. Like, let's just see, I'm young enough to kind of go. I'm very fortunate that I have very supportive parents. They were like, if this is what you want to do in life, well we'll support you and we'll, we'll just have a stab at it. Worst case scenario, you come back like, it's fine. And, and I went to Glasgow Clyde College not knowing I would stay in Scotland. I very much thought, right, this is a 2, 3 year course, gonna do that and then go back to Holland.
Pat:
Well Nina, I gotta say that's gutsy as hell. I mean, it's not like moving to another part of the Netherlands. You just up and went to a totally different country. That's not a small pivot. That's a big deal!
Nina:
Yeah, I think I don't give myself enough credit for that 'cause it's just like for me, there wasn't, there wasn't another way. I think if I would've stayed in Holland, I would've gone down a particular route that was just destructive for me. I mean it took a couple years before I totally sobered up. So like in Scotland, just drinking culture in England and Scotland is quite steep as also being a young 24-year-old we are here , I slotted into that very well and perhaps a bit too well. But despite everything, like I met the guys that I ended up sharing the workshop with in Glasgow Clyde College. And I was very lucky to get a place, but it was also kind of a done deal because when I applied I was the only woman and I was the only violin making student. So I ended up moving in 2016, starting a course in a country that I've never been before.
Nina:
Besides that one interview, in a group full of guy guitar making students. I was just like, okay. The first four months was really hard because you're in a country where you're speaking a a second language essentially a whole day. I wasn't used to that either. So I was so knackered at the end of the day. I remember coming home to my little flat and like living on my own for the first time. So I was at flatmates in Holland, just living on my own. Just kinda like sitting on the couch, going like watching telly, thinking like, I can't understand these people anyway, like needing subtitles because I'm so tired. And still to this day when I'm a bit tired, the subtitles come on. Even though now I speak English, pretty much all day every day and it's fine.
Pat:
It seems like you just can't help yourself. You just like, kinda like go off and blaze a trail.
Nina:
Yeah. Is both good and bad ways. I think another lecture in art school had to refer to me as a bit of a projectile. I guess when harnessed correctly, quite productively. But sometimes I can veer off path a little bit. It's, I've definitely gotten better. I think moving away from the city has definitely helped. Like living where I live, I live in rural Highlands, Scotland. It's just stunning. And I moved there mid-winter, so it was very gray and very wet and very dark. And I was like, oh no. And then slowly kind of end of February when it's in bulk, I always keep put a good eye out on what's happening. I I could actually see the seasons changing. You can take more time. 'cause yeah, highland time is a bit slower. I always joke like you, you can just see stuff happening.
Nina:
And I remember in April, 'cause there's a, there's a beautiful waterfall trail about, it's like an hour and a half walk. It's near my house. So I do that pretty often. So to have walk that like repeatedly over the months so many times. And then one time I have cut a long day at the work bench and I'm a bit stressed and right, oh, I'll just go out for a mental health walk. Went in and it's end of my street and you go down a little path and there's a line of trees and then there's a big ring of oak trees. And I all of a sudden noticed that everything had just exploded in green. And I said, and I was a bit delirious from working and I was remember just walking around cackling to myself like it's finally a spring. I get a lot out of living here. And that translates into my work as well. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed having a separate workshop in Glasgow. It was very, very good. Like I traveled to get to my workshop every day. And I had a space and like it was creative in a very different way. There's a level of you can only do so much because then I have to go back home. That took about an hour every day.
Pat:
I have to tell you. I understand because I live in St. Paul, but I had my studio downtown Minneapolis, which I would drive to back and forth, but there came a time when I got a little house and the first thing I did was had a old rickety garage. I got a couple guys to backhoe it, get rid of it. I drew the blueprints and I made my studio. It looks like a garage, but it's a studio. And so I commute 10 feet from the house to the studio. And in Minnesota, when you get these minus 40 wind chills and, and snow up to your head, you just shovel your way to the studio. And I love that. So there is something to be said about living in proximity or in a studio space.
Nina:
I very much like my workbench currently is in my kitchen. Perhaps it's a bit too basically. So that's close. I'm personally really good at compartmentalizing. Like it's all basically on one end of the wall as well and I can shut it off. I've, I've never been one of those people that has to be in the workshop from like 11 to like 9, 10, 11 in the evening. I was like, no, I'd rather be there kind of 9:30ish till about four. I've got off steam.
Pat:
But you, you know, you bring up a good point. When I was in art school, the model was that you put 12, 15 hour days in your studio. Well you know what, as a professional artist, no I don't have to to do that. I love how you said if you're working, you just get up, you go out and you walk. And I think there's a very, very important self-care component to a lifetime of being a creative, not just a flash in the pan, but if you're nurturing a lifetime of creativity so you take walks and you do whatever you need to do for your mental health as well.
Nina:
Yeah. And like it's coming back so you have long dark cold winters as well. Like you're just, there's a different level of functioning in winter as well. And it's, I think when you live in a city where everything is a bit contained, like the, the seasonalness of life disappears. And I think that's why people can brown a bit more quickly or a bit more aggressively. And like I had to tell myself at some point like, it's okay for me to be ready at like four because it's dark out and I just frankly wanna curl up on the couch with a book or I was like, oh, it's going to be dark at 4:00 PM I, and it's now I, I have 20 minutes to chop my wood for this evening. Like I have to prioritize a little bit. But yeah, taking care of what you do as a creative is I think is very important.
Nina:
I don't think it's something that's taught in colleges so much. And I think any type of art school or any type of craft school or any type of music school, it's, it's a bit of a bubble. I think when I think back about my time, I think very specifically to Newark, the Newark School of Violin that was a big bubble of like just a constantness, of like having to make, and especially in your second year you do big restoration stuff as well. And then I also had the weirdness of the pandemic happening in my second year. Everything ground to a halt as well. Yep. And it was like, oh wow, what do, what do we do? I think it is very important to listen to your own mental health but also listen to your body. Like what can you do violin making?
Nina:
It' is quite physical, especially if you make new instruments. I think repairs are more mentally a bit draining. I say this as, the last three weeks I've had three, I've got three big restoration projects on the bench at the moment. And before that I had like smaller repairs and I did a lot of my own making. So it's like after about the first week is I'm exhausted of all this problem solving and being incredibly careful. I wanna rough arch some cello backs or whatever. But yeah, it can be really physical what we do. I've had too many times in college where you have, you have a certain deadline and you have to be quite quick about something that you just overdo it physically as well. It's not sustainable. Like I absolutely adore cello making it is wonderful because it's bigger, you can see it a lot better. There's more material that you can like manipulate more. There's more material that you can remove or tweak. Then because violin's so small, you can only tweak it. 'cause then it just gets too small, like the kind of, that's it at some point. But with cellos there's just a lot more, which is simultaneously a bit annoying. 'cause sometimes it's never ending, but it's very physical. And I can't do full-on cello work every day, for example. Yeah, I would love to, but I'm physically just not strong enough,
Pat:
You're talking about each creative finding their own way of making, and that leads me to artists reinvent themselves. Writers take on new names. Like Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain. Creative people, shape shift when something inside demands it. And for you was becoming a luthier a reinvention or more like coming home to who you always were?
Nina:
Hmm, that's a good question actually.
Pat:
Well we're talking artist to artist so we can talk like this.
Nina:
I wonder what I would've said, like starting out as a violin making student and how, how that would be different from now. I think if you were to have asked me this question when I was just starting out at Glasgow Clyde College, I probably say I'm reinventing myself. Like I went away from Holland and I think now that I'm in my early thirties and I have made very specific decision on how I want to run my business, how I want to run my life where I live. It's like, maybe it is a bit more like becoming myself. Yeah. And I think because in your introduction, it's the line about being an extroverted introvert. I adore living on my own in the middle of nowhere and like, I don't drive either, which is a bit wild. Everyone, everyone in this area has and needs a car essentially.
Nina:
And everyone always goes, how do you get by? I think a lot of locals take pity on me. Like I get a lot of lifts and like I get a lot of stuff randomly delivered to my door, I get by, it's quite common for me to go days without chatting to anyone. And then all of a sudden I get a bit antsy and I need to speak to human . I'm a little bit too excited for calling the post, like the delivery guy. I recognized that from when I was really little. My mom was always really annoyed that I would either spend the entire day watching Disney movies or spend the entire day daydreaming inside. And I'll basically get to daydream in a sense, just whilst I'm working on something, perhaps I'm making my little, little me very happy by being surrounded by beautiful nature and I'm just doing stuff that I quite enjoy doing.
Pat:
I was reading this about you and I thought this was fascinating. You named your recent violin after a Welsh goddess of transformation and inspiration. Okay, I gotta tell you quite honestly, Nina, I was trying to pronounce this word . I even went online, how the hell do you pronounce this word? I'm not gonna do it.
Nina:
I mean, I can say it, I can say it.
Pat:
I was gonna ask you to say it because I wasn't gonna tell you the backstory. I wanted to be very sophisticated and say, oh yes please, please tell us her name. But you know the backstory. Go ahead.
Nina:
So Welsh's a completely different language from English as well. And Welsh, is one of the oldest languages I think in Europe. And there's a lot of sounds in Welsh that I have, I've, I have a certain familiarity with because in Dutch we have a lot of like throat noises, and sounds and like rolling R's. But Welsh is very difficult. It's very like in the front of the mouth and stuff. So I think the name is pronounced Ceridwen.
Pat:
Okay. Listeners, I'm gonna spell that for you. C-E-R-I-D-W-E-N. Okay. So you, you built her in both Glasgow and the Highlands. Number one. Why the name? And as you were building this violin, did she surprise you?
Nina:
I name all my instruments and it's not just after Welsh characters. I've had a cello named Lilith, for example. Yeah, Greek goddesses as well. I I tend to have names of characters that might be a bit misrepresentative or not entirely understood within a patriarchal society. Yeah, the transformation one, like, Ceridwen, it, it's like, I can't even say that I know the name as soon as I start making an instrument. It sometimes takes very last end before that a name comes to me. And like I do research mythical characters and see which one kind of like piques my interest. That particular instrument, it was the smallest violin I've made so far. It was the second model inspired by Amati, which is a family of historical makers. So usually, I pick a maker and pick one of their models and I use it as like a starting point.
Nina:
I'm not a perfect copyist, I'm not a bench bench copyist as that's called. That's a different level of skill that I, I admire but have no personal interest in. But I think with Ceridwen it was the first instrument that I felt really comfortable just making and I was able to perhaps shake loose a little bit of the, I should do things a certain way. It was more informed by a level of let's just see what happens. And I think wood as a medium is really tricky to work with because sometimes, as you might know, is it's very lovely to work with and carves beautifully and it does exactly what you want and other times it's just really hard. It's really tough or it's it really nice to work with in one way but then you do another process and it's completely does not what you want it to do. So yeah, I think, and it was definitely a bit of that and like having the opportunity of making, because I started making that violin in Glasgow and funnily enough I made parts of Ceridwen in the house that I'm currently am before I even moved in. So I have friends of mine who lived in this house before I did. And then when they moved out I was like, oh, what's, happening to the little cottage? And they were like, oh, we already gave your name to the landlords.
Nina:
So again, like all the stars kind of aligned. So yeah, it was pretty magical to then have an instrument that was at the time fully assembled but not varnished yet that has been in this space before. So then I moved in here and I got really lucky. I sold an instrument before I moved so I didn't have to look for work immediately. I had a bit of a buffer so I could spend some time just varnishing that the way I wanted it to be. Oh, varnishing, me and varnishing don't gel every instrument. I try a different technique and tried a different varnish but I was pretty pleased with how it all turned out.
Pat:
It's interesting that here you were constructing this violin at the same time constructing your life in this new place.
Nina:
Yeah.
Pat:
Talk about, art mirroring life, there you have it. Now a lot of people think of violins as finished delicate objects. What does it actually feel like to bring one to life from raw wood As an artist, I am dying to hear your answer.
Nina:
I say there is a spectrum of instrument making and instrument makers. You have one end of the spectrum and it's a complete sliding scale in my opinion. It's the one end of the spectrum which is incredibly well engineered. People try and they very heavily measure everything. They try and make the same thing over and over again. They try and have the same wood from the same tree. It's very methodical and almost just very engineering. And then the other end of the spectrum, it's very wishy-washy and it's a bit like, oh, you move with the wood and I only use a spruce that's been fell at moonlight from the Alps and I soak my wood in the bog because insert whatever. And I'm at neither, I'm a little bit in the middle I think, which sounds incredibly centrist to me, but I enjoy some level of engineering 'cause I keep forgetting that this is engineering to a certain degree.
Nina:
I actually make a thing that has like engineering behind it because it needs to work. Like the fact that it's arched is- that people have thought about this for centuries and it works because all violins roughly look the same and that's that I'm gonna people off in the trade by saying that they're all roughly violin shaped. But they all sound slightly the same but also very different. It's very objective sound. But I also enjoy the more kind of wishy-washy as in yes I do believe that some sometimes the material moves you in a certain direction. Like if 'cause flamed maple, which is like the traditional woods we use for the back and sides and neck, the more flamed it is that the harder it is to bend the ribs for example because it's just, it just doesn't want to. So that is, yes, it's a level of engineering because you, you a bend structure can be really strong, but it's also incredibly like physically demanding to just sometimes wrestle it in place.
Nina:
And I used to hate bending ribs and then after I've done my first set of cello ribs, it just clicked and I was like, oh, I just need to throw my entire body weight around while I'm doing this. And since then I was, actually, it's one my favorite things to do because it feels so powerful because it's such a, a physical dance almost. And I've gone from it taking sometimes days to sometimes be like, yep, that's 20 minutes, uh, that looks good to glue in place. Don't touch it, don't leave it alone. Don't even look at it. There's a level of magic in making that. I think a lot of people from the outside, they romanticize that and they think that's happening all of the time when it isn't. There's definitely, there's bits that are really annoying. There's bits that you have to get right and it's quite precise and it's quite, another example I give a lot was like instrument making is quite harrowing because every step takes a lot of time and skill to do something.
Nina:
And then the next step of this making like you spent hours doing like squaring up a neck blank, that's a very specific engineering thing. Everything has to be perfectly square to and in relation to each other. And then the next step, in order to make the scroll in the neck, you have to cut out the profile. So you have to cut into the perfect square thing bit of what the in was just made. So it's that level of like, oh I just, yep, I'm cutting into this thing but I've worked uh, 16 hours on or whatever. Like and the same with carving. You work in facets and this you're removing material. And it's that fine balancing between not removing too much but also not leaving on too much. I went to a course recently, it's the "movement of confidence" is something along those lines about like sometimes you just have to, instead of taking like three, four or 5, 6, 7, 8 cuts to do the thing which makes, gives you lots of facets. You sometimes get three cuts that it, it boom, boom, boom. Just, and that kind of level of confidence, it's a bit
Pat:
I like that. I like that the "movement of confidence."
Nina:
Yeah. Right. Yeah,
Pat:
That says it right there.
Nina:
And I think something that I've realized as well is like working with your hands is quite magical. Like there's a reason I wanted to become an educator in art because I think it's very valuable for people to see the result of your skill getting better in real time in situ and right in front of you. I think especially for children, it's really important to see yourself getting better and you find more skills. I also really understand that it's really daunting for a lot of people. It's very daunting for artists and the, the sense of like, I don't feel good enough. Like again, 16-year-old, 17-year-old me in art school, like, oh I don't, I can't paint like this person who's in their thirties and has been painting for 15 years. Yeah. Goes to me that comparisons. But I remember someone in art school saying like, uh, you don't start with confidence, you work towards confidence.
Nina:
Yeah. Like the more you do a thing, the more repetition you do things, the more comfortable you get with stuff and the better you get at it as well. And letting everything, 'cause it's like even to down to the tools that you've got. Like I was really lucky when I started as a student that my dad, who is a crafts person himself more of, of a hobby crafts person, but like he's always grown up. He basically renovated the house that I grew up in from like start to finish. I, I lived on a building site till I was about 12. And my dad did everything by himself and he is a civil engineer by training. So my dad realized how important it was to have good tools from the beginning. So instead of starting in Glasgow Clyde College with like a, a borrowed toolkit for first year, he, he bought me basically the basic nuclear toolkit, which is great.
Nina:
So I had that advantage of starting with quite good tools. But then another thing that actually honed my tools skills and my knife skills and my gouging and my chisels was when I started buying a lot of old tools. Newark in, England it's a, it's a market town. It's very quaint , it's very conservative, it was very pro Brexit. So that was fun as a European, but had a great market town and it was a town square round and it had a lot of stalls. And there was one stall was a guy who sold old tools. And I think especially in the UK there's a lot of old steel that's beautiful. And you buy a tool in a bit of a state and going through the process of cleaning up all the surfaces and regrinding bevels and then sharpening it. You learn the steel of your tool and sometimes it takes a bit of figuring out like, 'cause it's a different tool than it's a different steel than you're used to. And it's like, this is a lot tougher. So it's really hard for me to sharpen that by hand. But at some point when you've done it for a while, the penny drops and you're like, oh, I can apply this much pressure on this and then all of a sudden you, you can get it so sharp. Oh, there's nothing more delicious than a sharp tool.
Pat:
Listen, I understand. But you know, when you talk about confidence and being in school, one of the myths of art school I can remember is somehow that you go to school and your creativity and genius will burst forth and there you have it. And that was the expectation. Now on the other side of that, when I taught art, I would tell students the first day, you are here to grow your talent and to grow into your talent. And isn't that a creative life, Nina? That as we grow and making art or crafting a beautiful instrument, we are growing that talent and growing into it.
Nina:
And you learn annoyingly you learn by making mistakes. Yeah.
Pat:
A lot of them
Pat:
See here's the beautiful thing, the reason why artists have studios. So you can make your mistakes in private
Nina:
Yeah, Yeah.
Pat:
That's how I think of my studio. I can try things, do things and like you said, you work 16 hours on per perfecting something and then you gotta cut into it. Oh hell, I do that all the time. But in the privacy of my studio, so when the piece is finished- oh no must no fuss. It's all together.
Nina:
Yeah, I've actually found something really funny 'cause I very reluctantly joined social media as a maker. 'cause I'll circle back to that, but because I've kind of flipped switch towards social media, I can now kind of see it as like a, a portfolio that's just happens to be accessible from folks, which is nice, but it's also a portfolio for me. But because I'm filming myself often.
Pat:
Hey I follow you on Instagram, so I know exactly what you're doing!
Nina:
Get to see the very curated, the very edited as in the I'll pick the nice moments, blah, blah, blah. But I get to see of the three second bit that you get to see, there's like a maybe 20 seconds, 30, 40 a minute. And sometimes, especially when you're like gluing something up, like I see myself do the mistakes or the fuckups and like the man's like, I've got a very furrowed brow and I'm very concentrated this, oh this is so silly. But like even seeing how I'm moving has informed like, oh that's interesting. It made me realize how, how to do certain things. Being in the privacy of your workshop is a bit intoxicating. And I think recently in the beginning of June I went to a course down in Somerset, which is like the south of England, the British Violin Making Association of which I'm a member.
Nina:
They teach a lot of courses throughout the year and they go to a place called Halsway Manor. It's this beautiful English manor house. Everything is catered. You've got your own room, it's eye wateringly expensive, that's fine it's an investment in your own business. All of a sudden I went from being in my own little stone cottage tinkering away to like being in a group of nine people doing two very specific things. I had such a wobble of just like, I don't think I had very much a like I don't deserve to be here. Very imposter syndrome. But then after like the second day I had a bit of a meltdown and then someone gave me a bit of a pep talk and they also said like, we're all here in the same boat. Like we're all not in our own work, we're all stressed out. None of us have fitted this many sound posts on one instrument. Like we're all doing, like we're all in the same boat. And it's like fine, besides struggling a little bit. It was, it was incredibly valuable of just being able to swap ideas into just talk and so it was really, really good. But yeah, I couldn't wait to go just like, go home.
Pat:
I wanna shift gears a little bit. As a sculptor, I create objects meant to be seen. Your work on the other hand is meant to be heard. A violin isn't just looked at, it lives through sound. Does that change how you think about creation?
Nina:
Yeah, very massively. I think it's shifting a little bit in Newark at the moment, but when I was a student there, it to me it felt very detached from musicians. It felt very detached from the music world. I think I was a bit biased because as a person who went out to bars and pubs a lot in Glasgow, I was in the Glasgow folk scene a lot. So I knew a lot of musicians so I had a lot more opportunities just handing people instruments and like, or working on theirs. And that kind of disappeared in Newark because it's such a small town, it wasn't a huge amount of players that to me it felt very aesthetics only or you have to make a certain way and that will produce a sound. And I was like, yeah, it's good to start with that. It's been an important part of my making.
Nina:
But I think now that I have a bit more freedom with having my own workshop, I can experiment a bit more with what I want and, and it is interesting to just be able to try things out. Maybe I want to try at some point in life to make the same instrument over and over and over again to see what happens. But at, at the moment I'm just relishing a bit the let's just find out what each instrument's gonna, it's gonna sound like I don't play violin either. So yeah, it, it catches people off guard a little bit sometimes with the story book intimate workshop was, that was interesting because it was a violin maker who didn't play fiddle. It was a harp maker who didn't really play harp and it was a guitar maker who didn't really play guitar. We were more focused on making.
Nina:
But I wonder if it's sometimes, is it good or bad that I don't play the instrument? Yes, I am very much at the behest of a player when it comes to my own instrument. I can't try out my own instrument. I can with cello, I can get a decent sound of that as a bass player. But like, but I, I have to get musicians in. I have to translate what they're doing and I have to translate what they're saying and what their opinion is. I think on the other hand, I think I do sometimes have a bit more of a, I don't wanna say distance 'cause I think some musicians can get really bogged down with what they want from an instrument or like a certain sound or if it doesn't fit this incredibly specific idea which they have in their head and which sounds on their ear, it can kind of muddy the waters.
Nina:
And I feel like me as an outsider listening to an instrument as like I don't have to deal with all these preconceived ideas of what a violin should sound like. I just kind of listen to what it looks like and what it sounds like. Sorry. It's one of those things. I think ideally if you want to, if you, if you're looking to purchase a new instrument, if you want to buy a violin of you to buy a viola or a cello as a musician I would say yep perfect. Go ahead. Call your local luthier, call your local shop, say your budget and they will hand you a variety of instruments within, ideally within your budget and you try them out but get one of your pals who also play the instruments to come with, get them to play it so you can hear it in the room. 'cause what you are hearing under your ear as it's called might be different to how it sounds in the back concert hall or how it sounds in the room. Sound is a massive, massive part for my making.
Pat:
So a violin has a voice in a sense. And so as you're working on it, is there a point where you check the voice of the violin as you're working on it? Or is that something that happens at the end when the piece is finished?
Nina:
I think a little bit of both. I think I don't have enough experience entirely to have it fully boiled down just yet. I think when it comes to, I do think called your thickness, your fronts and back. So a front and the back of violin isn't all uneven thickness. There are, there are different thicknesses all over body. It needs to be thicker underneath the bridge 'cause there's a lot of pressure from the strings pushing down on the structure needs to be a bit thicker. Then you want it thinner around the edges. So it almost acts like a speaker code. So it can move. You can do two things. You can flex the plate as it is and the more flexibility you get, the better 'cause then it will move more and more easily. You can listen to the tap tones, you can use machinery for this or you can use your hands.
Nina:
There's a place on the violin front where you pinch it with two fingers and there's several places that you can tap and you can listen to what the tone is. If you've got a fancy machine, which we had in colors, you can actually just put tea leaves on it and it makes you shape. Those are the Chladni patterns. And that was a, I think a Czech scientist who took apart violin and noticed that if you blast certain hertz at it, it makes a particular pattern. And again it is where are you on that sliding scale of makers? Am I going to be incredibly engineery and try and get the perfect or do I go like, yeah that's roughly in the same. It's 'cause sometimes you get wood fronts and backs that are matched perfectly and you get 'em all in the right tap downs and they sound great and sometimes it doesn't.
Nina:
They're like semitones or tones apart and like no matter where you remove wood, it doesn't shift in the way that you want it to shift. And then you stick it together and it plays and it sounds fine, like I also think a new instrument is never going to sound the same ever. It is a living product would in essence, especially with new instruments, it's gonna take what, 50 odd years before it kind of settles into what it is. So when people want to buy new instruments, it's like well are you ready to go on a journey with your instrument for the next 30 to 50 years? It's pretty wild. People sometimes ask me like, why would people prefer to buy an older instrument over a new instrument? Well an older instrument, that learning curve of finding out what your instrument sound is is a lot shorter. I think an old instrument kind of, if it's well maintained, it does the thing straight out of the box. But with a new instrument it kind of constantly goes up and down, up and down, up and down. It's, it's been bits of trees for its most of its life and now it's wrestled into a shape. All of a sudden it's violin now it needs to learn to be a violin.
Pat:
What you're talking about now is time. And in a world chasing speed, convenience, there's something almost breathtakingly sacred about building an instrument by hand. So when we do that, what do we hold onto? Is it spiritually, culturally, even humanly when we keep that kind of making alive And what do we risk losing if we let it go?
Nina:
This line of question, something that comes to mind is my most dreaded question when I talk about the process of making the most annoying question. Can't you use a machine for that? I am the machine. It's me.
Pat:
That's what I'm talking about right there. Yeah.
Nina:
It there's a point to be made about factory made instruments. It obviously makes instruments available for a lot more people ideally. 'cause it's cheaper. It lowers the threshold for young people, for example to try and because they can buy a cheap factory instrument. The downside is that a lot of machine made stuff is not as refined. So it's not, it doesn't sound as good and isn't work as good. It's one of the things that breaks my heart as a, as a luthier, when I get people in my workshop with their instruments and the setup, for example is awful. So that's your, the setup is everything that kind of evolves the playability of an instrument. There's a lot of things that I can tweak and fix when people come in with like setup jobs and this. And I think the best example was a cellist I had in a couple weeks ago and noticed that her string heights were really high.
Nina:
So I said, does your hand hurt after you've been playing for a while? When you pushed down on the string? She said, oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm exhausted. I'm just a bad player. And then I measured it and I said, this is a lovely setup for double pace. This needs to be like half the height of what? No, no wonder your hands hurt. Oh, I thought it was me. He said, no, your instrument's not working for you. So I can do a thing which is a relatively easy fix. I hand back an instrument to a student and all of a sudden I can play a lot better because it's just, it works for them. It's easier and it's, it's like, so it's sad for me to, to deal with instruments that have been made badly because it doesn't help the player because it's not set up correctly.
Nina:
It doesn't move correctly. In an ideal world, I would like to give my instruments away for free to, to everyone who has not a penny to their names but wants to learn how to play a viola, whatever, have the thing, have the beautiful handcrafted, lovingly made viola. 'cause that will make you want to play it forever. Unfortunately in capitalism that doesn't work? No, I feel like I have to balance a fine line as in I have to remind myself and the world that I'm allowed to charge what I charge because my time is valuable. My time's costly. When things like budget come into my people say, oh that's a bit expensive. It's like, well I spent years learning this. I now spend hours doing this. I have collected all the tools that I need. I buy all the best materials that I can afford at the moment to make everything work.
Nina:
Like I'm allowed to ask what I need to make a living. And still I don't, I have three jobs at the moment, you know what I mean? Like typical Highland life. Everyone has like four jobs. The fact that I make handmade instruments for me is it gives me total control of how things are done. And I'm not saying how I do things are the only way to do things. 'cause everything and this all roads lo lead to Rome, everyone. And what works for me doesn't work for someone who's six foot six with massive hands and vice versa. I think a lot of women in their trade have struggled for a very long time because a lot of tools were designed for men. I'm a member of the women in Lutherie group on Facebook. Just hearing other women saying like, oh, I always really struggle with these big planes. And then someone says, well why don't you use a smaller, I'm like, use a V block plane. And they're like, oh actually I can do this.
Pat:
Well listen as you say that I'm five foot two. So my studio, I designed all my tables for my height on wheels. And when you buy tools, power drills, all these, these tools were huge. And so it wasn't until Makita came out with their drills. That they were actually, you could put it in your hand. Then after that, that was maybe what, 25, 30 years ago. And then after that you could start seeing tools made smaller and smaller. And that makes a difference. If you walk into my studio, everything is geared for five foot two and I love that.
Nina:
My biggest peeve in Newark. 'cause every, all the benches in Newark are historically tiny. And I'm five eight. I'm not tall for Dutch purposes, but I'm quite, I'm tallish in the UK. But every bench in in Newark is so low. And I always call it the Newark "goblin hunch" 'cause everyone's tiny benches and that's the way you do it in Italy and make a bench your right. What else? Some casters.
Pat:
We're hitting the top of the hour. I want to ask you now, looking back, what would you tell the Nina who first peeked into that violin workshop? What would you tell her now that you know about the path taken?
Nina:
I think I would say find your tribe. Think I was a bit unaware of what I was getting myself into. I think 'cause it's a, it is still a very male dominated world and I was a bit lucky 'cause like the lads at Glasgow were great. There was no sense of competition. It was just a very different mindset. But like my class in Newark was very competitive, the least competitive person on the planet. So that was difficult to navigate. But yeah, I think find your tryout because I joined the women in Lutherie pretty much when I first started. I went straight into self-employment outta college, which is a bit unorthodox. Most people work in a workshop for ages and then they, I didn't want to because I didn't wanna work for the a, a male boss if I'm honest. So, and then again the stars align the workshop, my flat in Glasgow, everything just lined up.
Nina:
So I just went, it, let's just try it. Yeah, when I joined the Women in Luthier group, which is a private Facebook group of all things, and it's just like for women, by women, it was nice to be able to ask a question online about like, Hey, how do I do a certain repair and not be barraged by just misogynist answers of like, "well I've been doing this for 40 years and you little girl shouldn't be doing that." And the first, okay, Brad, can I just get the answer please? And it was, it was a very comforting, welcoming, safe space that I then felt like this is how I want to be in my own workshop as well. I, I'd like to be as open as part, not just to women. I'd like to be open ideally to everyone, but especially women and especially people of color or any, any letter in the, in the alphabet is welcome kind of thing. It's like there can be too much hurt in the trade sometimes. It's definitely changing. I think the trade is changing a lot. I think a lot of people are shifting from the, I have had to suffer for my craft. Therefore you have to suffer as next generation. I think social media has a huge influence. I think a lot of stuff is more readily available. People are very willing to share. But I always say a lot of American Luthiers love to share, they love to give their information. I I love it. It's like great.
Nina:
I think us Europeans can take a note of that in, in all honesty, yes, I do think Scotland is still in the European Union, but it was great. And like the Women In Luthier group also gave the opportunity to become a member of their fellowship program. So they've run it a couple years. I think it's a bit on a low burner at the moment, but it was basically a mentoring program. I was matched with someone who's been in the trade for a very long time as a newcomer and is like, they mentored me online for a couple months and I spent four weeks with Melanie Martin in Baltimore, Maryland at the time. And just being able to, like, for four weeks we were in her workshop doing just restorations and like she's a woman herself. It was a bubble, but it was a very enjoyable bubble of just like her sharing all the information that she would've wanted to know when she was my age.
Nina:
Just starting out in the trade and is like, not so much like here are all my horror stories, but it's like, oh, it took me 10 years to figure out that you need to look at this. Whenever that happens. It's like, oh great. So I'm now working on something where I recently remembered that particular bit of information. It's like, oh yeah, I need to like shave off that end just a wee bit and then it fits and it's just, yeah, it's, it's very good. But find your tribe. It's very important to, to find your people and make space, uh, available as well. I tend to try and stay away from this scarcity model of like, oh, but there's so many violin makers. It's all very competitive. No, there's, there's enough musicians, uh, there's enough instruments and you can find a way to make it work.
Pat:
Well, Nina, you don't just make violins. You give them stories. Spine and soul. I really appreciate your candor in how you approach making beautiful instruments and also the back and forth of the people that you need in your life and the people you don't need in your life. And the way you talked about that is really quite heartening. And so, you know, hear from your little Highland house to every musician's hand, your work carries a kind of quiet magic that lingers long after that last note,
Nina:
I still, and I hope to hold onto this feeling, uh, until I eventually die behind my work bench, is that the first time you hear instrument played by someone, oh, beautiful. It is something like you worked on it for so long and you just, I mean, you get a bit like blinkers on. And so all of a sudden for it to then leave your nest, as it were, and especially an instrument, is it's the tool that a musician uses to make music, which is already a type of magic. 'cause I'm always impressed with just handing a musician an instrument. Like they've never played this instrument before. They're used to their own instrument and if they still manage to make beautiful music, I don't know how people do that. I make it seem effortless as well. It's really impressive. Yeah. I really hope on that. Every, every instrument I'm gonna be like, oh, like I think the best compliment I got recently about an instrument was that the musician played like one bow or going "fuck." Like, yeah, that's what I want. That's not too much to ask. I hope.
Pat:
One isn't. Well Nina, thank you for coming on Fill To Capacity today. It was just such a joy to hear you talk. Thank you.
Nina:
Thanks for having me. I didn't realize how quick the hour went. Oh, I can talk about my work for hours. I sometimes tell me, just tell me to shut up.
Pat:
No, I love that about you. Okay. Listeners, thank you for joining us today and take care. Bye.
