Don Rickert Musical Instruments(tm)

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Rickert & Ringholz Travel Violins Going Into Limited Production

We have spent well over 1000 hours of research & development time on the V-Gear(tm) Travel Violin. Extensive real world consumer testing of our most prototype versions revealed several key discoveries.

Little user interest in a take-apart version (violins are not that big to start with!)

• The Guarnari type (over the tailpiece) chinrests were causing numerous problems, which can be summarized as: too big for the small instrument, requiring extra (undesirable) bracing, case-fitting issues, etc.
• The folding "ebonized" ABS shoulder rest holders had too much flex and scratched the backs of the instruments.
• The instruments took a lot of effort to build, making an affordable price impossible.

Fixing these problems inspired a complete redesign, resulting in an-easier to construct, better sounding instrument, with better ergonomic attributes.

• The instruments are now built around a space frame (trade secret), allowing the use of extremely thin veneers for the sides (carbon fiber sides will also be available).
• We have developed a much stronger "wing" design for the shoulder rest adaptors.
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• The new design utilizes a Wittner 'over the tailpiece' chinrest.

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Trends: Neo DIY, Ethnography and Cigar Box Musical Instruments

There are three trends that we are paying careful attention to these days:

1. The new DIY (stands for ''do it yourself'), as exempified by Make Magazine: 20,000 people attended the recent 'Makers Faire', sponsored by Make (www.makezine.com). If you don't understand the need for an adult-sized tree-to-tree zip line or a soda bottle water rocket that travels hundreds of feet, you may not be interested. Note: See Brad's posting on this blog on the Make Magazine phenomenon.
2. Ethnography: A recent article in Business Week (www.businessweek.com) calls it the "new core competency" (we already knew that!). Thanks for an attendee at a recent lecture I gave with Jay Heisler of UPS on Ethnography in the Front End of New Product Development (you can download it from this site.) for this tip. We'll be posting several summaries on several related Business Week articles on New Product Ethnography & Design ASAP.
3. Musical instruments made from cigar boxes (who knows why, but we're in!): Google 'cigar box guitar' for instance and you will see what we are talking about. Note: be careful about signing up for the Cigar Box Cigar listserve--you will get more interesting stuff from brilliant eccentric inventor/tinkerers than you can even imagine.

Stay tuned for plans for building a cigar box fiddle that actually sounds good on this blog. We're almost finished...really!!

DR