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# A luthier on listening to wood
- URL: https://quiet.labs.enova.studio/podcast/ep-12-a-luthier-on-listening-to-wood/
- Published: 2026-07-17T09:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T20:11:45.000Z
- Description: with Tomás Bergh · 1h 11m
- Author: Enova Studio
- Tags: #podcast

Tomás Bergh makes about four instruments a year in a workshop above a bakery. He taps every piece of spruce before he uses it and can tell you what it will sound like in thirty years.

> The wood is already a certain way. My job is to not argue with it for the first month.  
> Tomás Bergh

## In this episode

1. 04:50 Tapping spruce, and what he is actually listening for.
2. 17:30 Why he will not use a moisture meter.
3. 31:45 The instrument he made in 1998 and has since heard twice.
4. 48:10 On varnish, and on how much of the mythology he believes.
5. 1:02:00 Forty more years.

## Mentioned

- *The Craftsman* by Richard Sennett
- Cremona spruce, and why he has stopped buying it
- The Bergh workshop notebooks, unpublished

Recorded above a bakery in Totterdown, at six in the morning, before the ovens.