A luthier on listening to wood

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• The Bergh workshop notebooks, unpublished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.