The work of the bench.
Every instrument here begins the same way — with a conversation, a chosen timber, and a design settled for one player alone. From there it is slow, patient, hand work: a body carved or bent to shape, a soundboard thinned and tuned by ear, and months at the bench before the first string is brought to pitch.
Much of the timber is Richie's own. It is drawn from the woodland around his home at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, in the Tanat valley beneath Pistyll Rhaeadr, counted among the Seven Wonders of Wales. Trees are felled and seasoned within a few miles of the bench, read by hand and left to dry for years before a board is ever cut. The bench itself sits a few miles south, in Llanfyllin — a small town that still fills with music each summer, when its festival gathers players into the old church of St Myllin.
Below is the workshop journal — notes and photographs from the bench as the work goes on. The finished instruments, and the forms they take, live under the instruments.
The workshop journal.
A slow record of what happens at the bench — a photograph, a title, a few lines. An entry appears when something is worth stopping to note: a board that rang true, a curve that took three attempts, a crwth strung for the first time.
Against the old ones
There are only a handful of old crwths left to measure yourself against — and even they are not perfect.
Read the entry →
A pipe of elder and horn
Not everything on the bench has strings. The pibgorn is Wales's old hornpipe — a reed pipe with a horn at each end.
Read the entry →
Four or five new players in the world
Three crwths on the bench at once — and a way of counting the work that has nothing to do with money.
Read the entry →
A fiddle carved like a crwth
An experiment at the bench — a little dance-fiddle carved from one piece, halfway between the crwth and the violin.
Read the entry →
A chair from the black oak
Not everything that leaves the bench has strings. This is a chair — and the wood in it may be eight thousand years old.
Read the entry →
Carved from the one block
A crwth is not built up from pieces — it is taken away from a single block until the voice is left behind.
Read the entry →
Wide enough, and off the heart
Half the making is done before the first cut — in the choosing of the board.
Read the entry →
Hear when something leaves the bench.
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Those with an instrument on order are followed most closely of all: their own build, photographed and noted at each stage, is a journal kept for them alone.