Don Rickert Musical Instruments(tm)

How Supporting Small Businesses Makes People Good Citizens

This site is no longer being maintained. Relevant posts have been moved to the new site www.AdventurousMuse.com, which is associated with our new, expanded and just plain better online musical instrument store www.AdventurousMuseStore.com.

The causes of recessions are complex. This one is no different. Among the many casualties of recessions are the small businesses (like ours) because, out of a combination of necessity and fear, people stop buying things. Small businesses, which comprise the largest sector of the U.S. economy, are hit so hard that they have to do things like lay off employees (making the recession worse), the owners "burn" their cash reserves, becoming poor and in deep debt, and many shut their doors...and on and on.

One of the many things that MUST happen in order to end a recession is for people to start buying things again, especially small businesses. You get the picture.

buying, economy, good citizens, recession, small businesses

"New Frugality": How Bad is It?

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Well, first of all, it is not bad to be a tad less materialistic than things had gotten, as books like Affluenza warned several years ago. The problem is that mass behavior does not follow the rules of logic that even smart individuals are not that good at following. Mass behavior, such as, say, Economics, can suddenly swing from one extreme to another. We've gone from $2,000 handbags to buying nothing that costs a lot, even if it is worth every penny. Hmm, could he be talking about innovative fiddles?

Might could be (as we say in the South)...

People are passing up deals that they would have jumped on a year ago, like...

• pay 1/2 now and the balance later
• monthly rent-to-buy
• free expensive stuff like cases and bows

Random thought...I wonder if it's a good time to get in on the foot-operated loom market? People are still going to wear clothes, right??

Well, it's time to do something different, or we are all going be wearing Amish hats, and using words like "thee" and "thou" in our daily conversations. Note: no offense to the Amish intended, but, face it, the Amish are the ultimate role models for frugality...but their's is true Old-School genuine frugality, combined with a value for craftsmanship and paying fair prices for goods...have you ever seen the price of a genuine Amish straw hat, or a horse-drawn buggy? Trust me--not inexpensive!

...the so-called "New Frugality" is a fad that could destroy the global economy.

Affluenza, Amish, craftsmanship, economy, fad, New Frugality

What Don Rickert Musical Instruments is doing about the "New Frugality"

This site is no longer being maintained. Relevant posts have been moved to the new site www.AdventurousMuse.com, which is associated with our new, expanded and just plain better online musical instrument store www.AdventurousMuseStore.com.

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In the last posting, you got to experience a highly edited version of my rant about the media-fueled "New Frugality" and probably irritated just about everybody, as just about everybody is now part of the "Nouveau Frugal" class. Hope that I did not make you too mad.

Anybody who really knows me is well-aware that I would rather shovel manure (which is not simply an abstract notion, as I have friends who own a Clydesdale horse farm) than revise our business plan yet one more time. We are revising the entire Don Rickert Research & Design biz plan. I will limit my commentary here to highlights directly related to the musical instrument business.

• We are going to hold prices where they are, as they are already at rock bottom from a profitability standpoint.
• At the same time, we are going to make it possible for you to own some of our instruments at suitably frugal prices.
• Some instruments are off-limits, such as the Type II and Cradle of Harmony Octave Violins and, at least until patent issues are nailed, the Adventurer II Travel Violin. Our new violin synthesizers are off limits as well, as there are enough open patent issues to put a patent lawyer's kids through college and they are not even on the market yet.

So, how can you get a Don Rickert Musical Instruments violin for a really low price?...you can make it yourself. Actually, you can buy a kit from us and do all of the time consuming stuff yourself, such as sanding, sanding and more sanding, cutting soundholes and varnishing. We are going to offer the kits in various stages, depending on your self-assessed skill level and the tools you have access to.

We need a few days to work out the different kit stage levels and pricing for each. The instruments available, subject to revision, will be:

• The Neil Gow Pochette
• The Travel Master Travel Violin
• The Adventurer I Travel Violin
• The Re-enactor Cigar Box Fiddle
• The "Whiskey Box" Fiddle (we never sold this in completed form anyway.)

We will also be offering the Maggini replica violins in "white" (i.e. unvarnished, bridge and pegs to be fit, soundpost to be set, etc.) form for a greatly reduced price.

We will also be offering a kit completion service.

The high-end Octave Violins (Type II and Cradle of Harmony) will never be offered as kits, as they require at least 5 special molds and jigs , which are all trade secrets, in order to make them in anything under 300 hours.

Don Rickert Research, Design, kit, Neil Gow, pochette, Travel Master, Adventurer, Travel, Violin, Fiddle, Cigar Box Fiddle, Whiskey Box Fiddle, Maggini replica, Octave, Cradle of Harmony, Don Rickert Musical Instruments

Trying to Figure Out What to do About the "New Frugality"

This site is no longer being maintained. Relevant posts have been moved to the new site www.AdventurousMuse.com, which is associated with our new, expanded and just plain better online musical instrument store www.AdventurousMuseStore.com.

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Every time I see the current issue of Time (or is it Newsweek), I almost get sick (literally), because my academic training (Ph.D. from the George Washington University School of Business, admittedly in ergonomics and design/consumer research; not finance or marketing communications) and especially my experience tell me that the media are having more fun than they have had in years creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

So now we have an official for nobody buying anything expensive of real lasting value...the NEW FRUGALITY. I guarantee you that there will be an exponential increase in the phrase in anything written about marketing, product development, and so forth, academic as well as magazine articles.

Anyway, we are trying to figure out how to change our business so that the "Nouveau Frugal" don't have us living under a bridge before long.

• We're not going to have slave laborers in various "off-shore" companies make our stuff so that we can sell you cheap crap, but at a fashionably frugal price. We know that if any of the big bowed instrument online stores sold the kinds innovative instruments that we sell, we would be in real trouble, but we don't see a pochettes and octave violins and fiddles in Shar's (and others like them) future.
• We're certainly not going to revisit "fire sale" pricing, because that just makes me angry...don't need anger anymore.

Read about what we are going to do about the media-fueled "New Frugality" in the next posting...

New Frugality, Nouveau Frugal, pochettes, octave, violins, fiddles, design, consumer, research

The Second Most "Interesting" Question Ever Asked of Me

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I used quotes around "interesting", because I really mean stupid.

You might ask: "Why is Don telling us about the second most stupid question?" The answer is so that the MOST stupid question will have more meaning and just because.

The second most "interesting" question anyone ever asked me was simply "Why?", accompanied by facial contortions and tone of voice which translated roughly to "Why would anyone ever design something so useless as a pochette or travel violin"? This second most "interesting" question was asked while a customer was in the process of BUYING one of our earlier travel violin models at a Old Time fiddlers' convention. There is lots more to the story like the customer lecturing the question asking interloper, me telling her to leave, her boyfriend threatening to beat me up and then changing his mind when I said "You had better think really hard about that, as you will get hurt bad...I am told that I said this with a consider level of menacing power.

And you thought that the fiddle and violin business was refined and cultured (well, maybe not the fiddle business)...but the violin biz is just as full of adventure as the fiddle business.

Now...you are probably on the edge of your seat with anticipation of finding out the MOST interesting question. You have have to go to our www.BaritoneFiddles.com site to find out.

pochette, fiddle, travel violin, violin, www.baritonefiddles.com

One for the historical accuracy know-it-alls

I don't normally write such obnoxious blog postings, but I this is an exception. We've picked up some discussion on blogs and mailing lists suggesting that the machine tuners on one version of our 1860s style cigar box fiddle are historically incorrect...WRONG!

Everybody who actually knows the history of stringed musical instruments knows that geared tuners similar to those used today were invented in the early 1800s. The first Martin guitar (1833) has geared tuners. You can see a picture of it at the C.F. Martin website.

The current issue of 'American Lutherie' (Fall 2007, #91) has a very detailed article with lots of pictures of a pre-1860s Martin with, yes, geared side-mounted machine tuners.

What is VERY historically incorrect for anyone claiming to have a Civil War era cigar box fiddle or reproduction of one is pasted on artwork on the box. That did not start until some time in the 1890s. Before that, boxes were hot branded, stamped, and so forth, but no paper artwork like today's cigar boxes.

OK, I'll return to being nice :-)

geared machine tuners, guitars, cigar box fiddle, C. F. Martin

Think About that Chinese Fiddle

This is NOT the promised third posting about changes we are going to make to www.FiddleandBowStore.com. That is coming soon, but this rant came out of my fingertips first. If it sounds a bit like sour grapes. I'll admit to it now in order to save you the trouble of pointing this out in your emails (why don't people use the comment feature of blogs?)

We at Rickert & Ringholz have been able to determine that a lot of violin students (actually, their parents), as well as a surprisingly large number of adult fiddlers, get "great deals" on instruments from China. All the so-called top-name online stores (won't name them...can't afford to be sued this week) sell Chinese instruments, using marketing verbage in the product descriptions that is the equivalent of polishing a t**d.

The ready availability of Chinese instruments is a primary reason for why people don't buy high quality instruments, which happen to be expensive. I guess we are all looking for a great deal...you know, the hundred year fiddle from the old man at the flea market or yard sale who doesn't know its real value, the $100 "steal" on eBay, and so on. OK, every now and then you get lucky, especially at yard sales. Whether this is morally defensible is another question altogether (the correct answer is NO. it's not!).

As far as eBay goes, you are more often than not going to end up with a piece of junk or a NEW Chinese instrument made in the "Italian" or the "French" or the whatever tradition that sounds classy. Ask yourself this: do you really think that a professional eBay vendor (look at the seller's number of sales when you buy) is going to NOT make a profit? Think again.

This brings us to back to Chinese violins. The cheap ones are either painted or so heavily varnished that you can't tell what instrument is under all of that gloss. The better ones, costing several hundred dollars, have a very distinctive feature...perfect "old spruce" top and unbelievably well-flamed sides and back. Hate to burst your bubble, but the flaming is a really good paint job under the varnish and the perfect "old spruce" top is a printed shrink "skin", sort of like that used on cheap wall paneling. We'll show you some pictures after we have our upcoming "radical de-construction" of a Chinese violin. This may involve fireworks that are legal in the States where they are sold...look for it on YouTube under DoctorFiddle in the next week or so.

The techniques mentioned above keep the costs down, which keeps the sales price low, but the unethically cheap labor really keeps the costs and sales price down.

Think about all of these things as you play your POS fiddle made by underpaid, and often under-aged labor.

To paraphrase William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement (known chiefly for his wallpaper prints), who was no Angel himself as a business-person, but who wrote many on-point essays: Quality products designed to last a long time cost more money than garbage that merchants who provide it to you are secretly ashamed to sell you...that is if they let themselves introspect beyond the greatest cop-out of the last several centuries..."It's just business; nothing personal."

Note: Needless to say, we don't sell Chinese instruments at www.FiddleandBowStore.com. The closest thing we have to a sweat shop is our own design studio and workshops in Atlanta and Birmingham.

iolin, fiddle, Chinese, William Morris, cheap, sweatshop, Don Rickert, www.FiddleandBowStore.com, Rickert and Ringholz Musical Instruments

The Violin Was Perfected 300 Years Ago...Hogwash!

This is one of those quick, terse blog entries, because I am supposed to be cleaning up my shop to start on prototyping several new instruments.

With the general slowdown of the Holiday period and having the flu (should have gotten that flu shot), I have been looking at a lot of violin and fiddle related websites and blogs and have seen far too many assertions that the violin was perfected centuries ago. This ranks up there on the idiocy scale as the statement by the Director of the U.S. Patent Office early in the 20th Century that the Office was no longer needed, because everything worth inventing had already been invented.

The violin was not perfected three hundred or even 400 years ago (I prefer the Magginis of the early 1600s myself). What was perfected was a basic design pattern for a particular type of violin adopted for particular types of music. Heck, even Thomas Jefferson, who was in debt up to his ears, but managed to get an Amati and one of the first Tourte bows (which were considered as outrageous as IncrediBows when first introduced) did not dare take his Amati to the local pub for a fiddling jam session. He took a Dancing Master's Pochette, for which he had a leather saddle case made. The best pochette in the world would not have compared to an Amati, Strad or Guarnerius, but it was absolute perfection for Tom J's immediate problem, getting to a pub and back home on horseback, with a lot of drinking and playing in between.

That's all for the moment...back to the shop to get ready for our next effort at divergence from stupid perfection. Probably something old Antonio did a number of times. By all accounts, he was just as irreverent about stupid traditions as the irreverence embodied in these words.

More to come I am sure. Let the comments fly, but keep it clean, as I have the "Block User" button and I'm not afraid to use it :-)

DR

violin, fiddle, Stradivarius, Maggini, Amati, perfection, pochette, Don Rickert, Rickert & Ringholz

A Big Surprise to Us

Judging by emails I recieve, many readers of this blog have figured out that I (Don Rickert) am not just a fiddler, fiddle enthusiast, luthier (one who makes stringed instruments) and musical instrument designer, but an academic type as well. I will admit it...I do have a Ph.D. from the George Washington University School of Business and am adjunct faculty member in the Industrial Design Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, better known as Georgia Tech.

At GA Tech, I teach all the biz school kinds stuff that new Industrial Designers need to know like NPD (New Product Development), design research methods, statistics, market research, consumer research, human factors/ergonomics, etc. Knowing this, you might not be surprised that I research the daylights out of every musical instrument concept that Rickert & Ringholz designs for sales potential, market size, and so forth.

Most of the research we do is called Consumer Research or 'Consumer Insights' and involves actual musicians and much of this research occurs in their natural habitats like fiddlers' conventions, 'sessions' in pubs, Scottish Highland games, Irish music festivals, Saint Patrick's Day celebrations, etc. By the time we start producing a new instrument in any kind of significant quantities, there have been at least five prototypes built and tested. Basically, we have the situation pretty well sussed...or so we think.

Well, this is one of the few times that I will admit to completly missing key opportunities due to asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. I am telling you that we would NEVER had pursued cigar box fiddles or Dancing Master's Kits (really skinny fiddles, also known as 'pochettes' or 'pocket fiddles'), had I relied solely on consumer research.

In the case of cigar box fiddles, we knew that people found them interesting, but felt that people would not actually buy them, at least for the kind of money we would have to charge to make ones that played well and sounded good. In the case of 18th Century pochettes, no way! Fortunately for us, we discovered the surprise potential for cigar box fiddles by attending more music festivals in North Carolina and Virginia and keeping our eyes open. The pochette story is one of the interaction of plain dumb luck and YouTube.

The following two postings briefly describe the cigar box fiddle and pochette stories. Bonus, these postings contain links to some of the best damned fiddling you will hear today (except your own, of course).

Rickert and Ringholz, Rickert, Ringholz, Fiddle and Bow Store, fiddle, bow, musical instruments, cigar box fiddle, pochette, dancing master kit

A Big Surprise, Part 2: Cigar Box Fiddles

Click on images for larger view.

From the first time that we ever brought a cigar box fiddle to a festival (I believe it was the Tennessee Valley Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention in Athens, AL), we knew that cigar box fiddles attracted potential customers to our vendor tent, especially if there was anyone playing one who was any good at it. People thought that they (the cigar box fiddles) were interesting buy never actually bought them.

Just when it seemed like cigar box fiddles were never going to be more than a crowd attractor, we were fortunate enough to be invited to set up shop at the first annual Hoppin' John Fiddlers' Convention in Silk Hope, NC. As had become standard, we had a 'modern' (made from a new cigar box we got in a cigar store) cigar box fiddle as well as a Civil War era replica model. It was at Hoppin' John that the proverbial 2x4 hit us up side the head...CIVIL WAR RE-ENACTORS! It seemed that every other person at Hoppin' John was in one North Carolina re-enactor regiment or another. These, people, as crazy about really really Old-Time music (before it was called that) as us, actually care about historically accurate period fiddles, fiddle music and playing technique...to quote one of these truly cool folks, in response to our offer to put a chin rest on a fiddle he was about to play: "What do I need a chinrest for?"

Checking into matters a bit further, we discovered that there are a whole lot of 'authentic campaigners' in all the places Rickert & Ringholz Musical Instruments had NOT been a vendor before, like Northern Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina. I suddenly remembered the re-enaction events I used to attend in Maryland and Northern Virginia, some had as many as 10,000 re-enactors. Actually played fiddle with a Confederate Irish brigade once or twice. We are starting to explore selling our Re-Enactor Cigar Box fiddles through the network of specialty stores (called Suttleries) set up at the larger events.

We want to hear from those of you who play fiddle, banjo, or more exotic instruments, such as soap box cello, as part of your re-enacting, presumably while encamped and not actually on the battlefield. There could even be a deeply-discounted or even free fiddle in it for you if you agree to be photgraphed and/or recorded while playing one of our instruments at a battle re-enaction event (Yes, you've got to be in uniform!). You can reply, either by commenting to this posting, or by email at drickert@bellsouth.net.

Now, for a treat of hearing a really great banjo player and period-style fiddler playing several of our instruments. Click here to see and hear on YouTube.

Rickert and Ringholz, Rickert, Ringholz, Fiddle and Bow Store, fiddle, bow, musical instruments, cigar box fiddle