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Daniel Joseph Betsill, luthier, et al

djbetsill@bellsouth.net

Artist's Statement

My Resume

Press

PLEASE NOTE I AM NOT MAINTAINING CORRESPONDENCE ON THIS WEBSITE. I AM NOT CURRENTLY TAKING COMMISSIONS FOR INSTRUMENTS. I AM NOT ABLE TO RESPOND TO QUERIES ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THIS SITE AT THIS TIME.

Thursday, January 4, 2024

I got one thing done in the workshop in 2023. . .I finally obtained a Turkish Cumbus and removed the clunky, black laquered, tuning-machine-festooned neck and made what is basically a vihuela banjo. . .my dream instrument

Strung with a set of Reniassiance lute nylgut. Now. . .how do I play it? Oud? Medieval Lute? Banjo with another bourdon?

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Saturday, January 29, 2022

One instrument was completed in 2021. I didn't have time to make a vihuela. . .but I had time to make this coconut uke! See here for project log.

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Thursday, August 5, 2021

Starting to get serious about building a 12-string. My drawing is based on the 1888 Torres pattern. THe styling is Art Deco. Click here for project details.

Bending the rib for the tenor cittern

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Monday, January 4, 2021

Starting a new Tenor Cittern.

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Thursday, December 24, 2020

A little workshop time to make a new pipe. . .and take it on a walk in the woods

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

Work on two vihuelas in sapele and a Torres-pattern flamenco guitar in mahogany.

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Sunday, June 7, 2020

Finally an instrument made. . .a post for this year. . .a new dulcimer in pecan, the companion to the "Glasebrook' dulcimer I made about three years ago.

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Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Good thing: a posting since over a year ago. Bad thing: it's not a lute. I continue to have my day job suck all my creative time. But at least I have some new posts to my architecture page.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2018

The pecan dulcimer is complete. On the left is my original "deGive" dulcimer which I used as a pattern for the new instrument. See this page for build log.

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Saturday, February 10, 2018

After many months away from the workshop. . .some new dulcimers. I am making two identical instrumnets based on my "DeGive" pattern dulcimer out of pecan planks culled from one of my architectural projects. This pecan is from Texas and wound up as the paneled study in a house on Sea Island, Georgia.

I am doing something new in the way I carve the peghead. Usually in these 19th c. pattern instruments the pegbox is carved from a single, solid piece of wood. But since I am working with planks that are only about an inch thick I have to join two pieces together to get the desired shape. So i'm taking this opportunity to rout out the peg channed before seaming the two pieces together.

General view of the work including a Hummel-shaped dulcimer I'm making out of maple. My guitar project nearby stands ignored.

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Friday, May 5, 2017

At long last some time in the worksop and a new posting. A friend of mine gave me the metal table top and i made a base inspired by the original which was in metal. The original had these tapering, curved legs which are easy enough to replicate in wood but I found that assembling it was the challenge as there are no square edges or right angles to effectivly clamp. The key was using lag bolts to pull the legs into the x-brace. Makes a nice little industrial nod to the original too. This is Killz to hide the pine knots. i'll paint it a bright color TBD. Below is the process of making the legs. See furniture page for process photos.

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Sometime in 2016

This is what I'm doing instead of working in the workshop. Working.

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Friday, March 18, 2015

This is one of the first banjos I made which became a wall-hanger after I made some better instruments. But it's getting a second life with a new tailpiece. Although I made it with a 10" head I naïvely copied the fret pattern of an 11" instrument. Which put the bridge really close to the bottom of the head. Besides negativly impacting the sound it just looked bad. But I had the idea to fit it with a combination bridge/tailpiece which was found on some of the earliest gourd instruments. Not a feature that persisted into the manufactured-rim instruments of the post-Civil War but it's a folky nod to something a rural craftsman might do and this instrument is certainly folky. Also in the aesthetic department I'm making it a "moon shape" to echo the curves of the headstock. If it doesn't improve the sound at least it will look better hanging on the wall.

Surprisingly it doesn't sound any worse than when the tailpiece and bridge were separated. This instrument is never going to sound great due to other reasons, but at least now it looks cool.

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Sunday, March 6, 2015

Workshop visits are so infrequent these days even the most mundane tasks get documented. Relocating my mini lathe has prompted me to level the bench top it sits on after many years of damage. Too wide to fit through the bench planer so it gets done the old fashiond way.

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Sunday, September 13, 2015

It's getting harder to get in the workshop these days. Got about an hour in today and got the Honduran mahogany neck for a flamenco rough cut. and the Torres form waxed. This is the last of the "variegated" beeswax I made with van Dyke crystals from the cradle project.

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Saturday, July 18, 2015

The tavern sign is complete.

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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Progress on the tavern sign. All pieces are made and assembled. Just need to sand that bondo and get the primer on. See the furniture page for more progress photos.

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Saturday, March 7, 2015

Progress on the vihuela. See here for build log.

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Sunday, February 8, 2015

A set of sweetgum bowls are complete.

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Sunday, February 8, 2015

After a long hiatus, work resumes. My drawing for a 12-string guitar in the spirit of an early blues instrument (but with the Torres body shape) and a set of bowls made from sweetgum from the property of a popular country artist now residing in Leiper's Fork, TN. Also just visible in the upper left of the drawing shot is the back pattern for the vihuella which I am finally starting.

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Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Bolduc House cradle is complete! The only remaining piece to add is the actual hardware which we are having made by a blacksmith in Stone Mountain. I have painted black hardware-store hooks and eyes in place temporarily. I created a page for the project here.

To keep the finish 100% natural I'm using Van Dyke crystals (ground walnut husks) and a beeswax mixture I put together with turpentine and Rottenstone and some of the stain mixed in. This was such a pleasant experience making my own finishes and not having noxious fumes that I think I will start using this finish on my instruments.

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Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Progress on the Bolduc House Cradle. The original appears to have some sort of tack securring each intersection on the basket. The original probably had its rails mortised to slide the staves through, unlike my version that has the rails built up out of pieces (the laminations also visible in this shot before I cleaned them up). So my tack is doing double duty by keeping the stave from sliding out but I'm using a brass tack that's just a little longer than the assembly so I can crimp it down on the inside face to ensure that the pieces never pull apart. The head embedded on the outside face makes a nice detail. God is in the details.

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Saturday, June 28, 2014

Turning the bun feet for the French colonial cradle. One down, three to go! Turning two at a time. I'll finish the head profile and do the final sanding after both are roughed out when I can worry less about deflection. I'll round the corners of the flats off the lathe.

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Wednesday, June 19, 2014

My drawing of a cradle found at the Bolduc House in St. Genevieve, Missouri. Below, a photo of the room in which the cradle resides.

Most of the original crib is white oak, however the posts are some kind of closed-grain wood like cherry. I found some 3" thick cherry at Carlton McClendon which had its own story: hand adz marks. Who knows how old this is or where it came from, but it's old.

Tweaking the shape of the end panels.

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Sunday, June 1, 2014

My new home office requires a desk. I finally have a reason to make one of these Spanish Renaissance chest-desks. The front panel folds down to be the writing surface and interior is usually filled with a warren of highly decorated drawers. My interior will be open to fill with monitor and tower. The base is greatly simplified, opposed to the barley twist turnings and carvings of the originals. This is another one of my patented 2x4-made-in-a-day projects. See furniture page for process shots.

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Thursday,May 8, 2014

Beginning a sign for my Aunt's property in South Georgia. Inspired by 18th c. stagecoach tavern signs with a lettering style popular in the 1940's when the schoolhouse was built. See furniture page for some process shots

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Sunday, April 27, 2014

Work on the candlestand is complete. Two atmospheric evening shots in-situ. The top box wound up being taller which made the legs shorter than drawn to keep the piece at 30". And I went with the turtle instead of the bird.

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Saturday, March 15, 2014

A spalted sweetgum bowl. One of a pair made from a client's homesite in Serenbe, Georgia.

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Thursday, January 23, 2014

New year's resolution: fix this Kay Kraft. I have had this instrument for 20 years. I saw a big ol' picutre of Patterson Hood from Drive-By-Truckers in this month's Garden and Gun sporting a Kay Kraft just like mine. . except his clearly is playable. Looks pretty cool! Wish I had one! Wait, I do have one. I got this for probably about $75 from Lark in the Morning when I was in college just on sight of the tiny black and white picture in their catalog. Never seen a body shape like that before. Had to have it. It was listed in 'fair' condition. What it had was a completely shot fingerboard, a freaking BULLET hole and a hack wood-putty patch job. On top of that the top was worn through TO THE LININGS on about 2 inches of the upper bout. I discovered this only after peeling back about ten layers of dark varnish. Long story short, it went on the wall.

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Thursday, December 19, 2013

My first resonator banjo is complete. See this page for project log and scroll down to "From Start to Finish: A Bluegrass Banjo".

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Thursday, September 19, 2013

The lyre is complete. See this page for build log.

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Thursday, September 5, 2013

Beginning a commission for a closed-back banjo. See this page for build log. Scroll down to 'A Bluegrass Banjo'.

 

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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The DeGive dulcimer fretboard is glued to the top with staple frets in place.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Work in progress: The lyre is ready to have the yoke attached; The tenor cittern has the top rough cut and is waiting on the top spar to be shaped and set in place; The DeGive dulcimer is ready for its top and fretboard.

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Sunday, July 21, 2013

The current DeGive Dulcimer: a detail of the end block showing a couple of vestigial nail holes.

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Thursday, July 4, 2013

Work commences on my replica of the Sutton Hoo Lyre, made from the DeGive House wood. See this page for build log.

The neck and back are attached to the rib and I can do the final shaping of the heel of the tenor cittern. This shot helps to show the scale of the instrument against the baroque guitar body to the right. The baroque guitar body which will someday be an instrument but for the past five years has been a filing cabinet.

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Tuesday, July 2,2013

Carving the heel of the tenor cittern

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Heaven's Door is back in my workshop to correct some damage done by the great GSU Music School Flood of 2011 and I'm taking the opportunity to revisit the panel hanging method. This is now the third iteration of the system to hold the heavy plates at the nodes without dampening the resonance. The first method was with swaged wire rope that proved to be overengineered and warped the frame when the instrument contracted in a dry interior. The second method was a less elegant tensioned fiber rope setup which was difficult to adjust and relied on twine to hold the plates back to the frame at each seam. This new idea is much simpler, with sticks running along the nodes of the plates and screws tapped through them directly into the plates. The Door has really come full circle; because the original German Door used bolts at the back of the plates to hold them to the frame. The German design, however, fixed the bolts at the four corners of the plates and ignored the acoustic advantage of holding the plate at the fundamental node. My fix points tap into dowels, which I filled in at the previous rope holes at the node locations. Just two screws set about 2 1/2" down from the top of each plate lets them 'hang' and resonate freely, separated from the stick by felt pads. This system means no tensioning of a 'through rope' and holds the plates in place without the need for adjustment. If only I had thought of this in 2005.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013

A celtic mandola I slipped in for myself between commissions. It's walnut with Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and peghead veneer. I wanted an instrument that would be at home in the 19th c. so I used friction pegs and brass frets.

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Saturday, May 25, 2013

The symphonia is complete! See here for project log.

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Saturday, March 16, 2013

A day off for bowlturning. See here for project log and scroll down to 'A Beechwood Bowl.'

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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Progress on the symphonia. See here for project log.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Some recent activity with Stockhausen's Heaven's Door. See the Instruments page for project description. The Door was set to be performed at Lincoln Center in NYC yesterday, but unfortunatly Hurricane Sandy put the skids on and the door is headed back to Atlanta unplayed. A reschedule is in the works. In the mean time, WABE did this article on the piece:

WABE on City Cafe and a corresponding Georgia State Article

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Saturday, July 21, 2012

I am beginning my research on the 16th c. vihuela de mano for a commission. I've always wanted to make one of these instruments, having danced around them chronologically with my study of the pre-renaissance vielles, the chitarra battente and the baroque guitar. On the page I have created I will compile my research of the three surviving documented examples, a survey of the iconography and of the revival instruments. Click here.

 

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Workshop in a closet.

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Online Chap Book:

 

 

 

 

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

-William Blake

 

 

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

-Henry David Thoreau

 

 

Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.

- J.R.R Tolkien, from the Lord of the Rings

 

Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with its daimon, that portion of himself that Zeus has given to every man to be his guardian and guide and that his soul does all that the daimon wishes. And this is every man's understanding and reason.

-Marcus Aurelius

 

 

 

And there the sunset skies unseal’d, Like lands he never knew, /Beyond to-morrow’s battle-field /Lay open out of view /To ride into.

-D.G. Rossetti, from The Staff and Script

 

 

 

 


Let Athene dwell in the cities she's founded. For me, the woodlands.

-Virgil

 

 

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,/ Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life/ They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

-from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

 

 

He slept thus until late morning, while the pillows arranged themselves into a large flat plain on which his now quieter sleep would wander. On these white roads, he slowly returned to his senses, to daylight, to reality - and at last he opened his eyes as does a sleeping passenger when the train stops at a station.

-Bruno Schultz, from The Cinnamon Shops

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deus Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

-Rudolph Otto

 

 

 

Are you angry with him whose armpits stink? Are you angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good does this anger do you? He has such a mouth, he has such armpits: it is necessary that such an emination must come from such things. But the man has reason, it will be said, and he is able, if he takes pains, to discover wherein he offends. . .there is no need of anger, the stuff of tragic actors and whores.

-Marcus Aurelius

 

 

 

 

Green aisles of Pullman cars/ Soothe me like trees/ Woven in old tapestries/ I love to watch the stars/ Remote above the earth/ In watery light,/ while in the lower berth./ I whirl through the night.

-William Rose Benet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve.

-Jinnah

 

 

The full streams feed on flower of rushes, /Ripe grasses trammel a traveling foot, /The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes/
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;/And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,/And the oat is heard above the lyre, /And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes /The chestnut husk at the chestnut root.

-Swinburne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both music and dance are voices of the way.

-Zenji Hakuin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You know, I have so little to say here this evening, /but there’s so many things that have been said over and over again /that need to be said /again and again. /And, it’s too small a planet—it grows smaller all the time in terms of travel time. /We are becoming one family. /We share each other’s technology and culture and poetry and philosophy. /And we have to begin to think of ourselves as a family. /We have to begin to enjoy the difference in the human family /like we enjoy the differences in a garden of flowers. /And there’s a race on—and the real race and the real ideological conflict is between those universalists who want to think in terms of mankind /and those reversions to barbarity and tribalism, /who are still hung up in ancient, anachronistic hatreds /like we see in Ulster, like we see in Israel, Palestine. /That we can see in so many parts of the world. /Without some system of law /we’re lost. /And we can’t have a system of law without a sense of community. /And we can’t have a sense of community without the underpinning of recognition of ourselves as parts of one family. /And there’s very little time left to muster /this broader vision against the ancient, conditioned reflexes and psychoses of mankind and his homicidal tendencies. /But either we learn to live together, /or we die together. /Is it necessary—is it necessary to have to repeat /after 2,000 years all the things you people read in Sunday school?! /How—how absent-minded—/how forgetful!

--I.F. Stone, collected from "A Maverick's View of the Nation and the World" (1983) by composer Scott Johnson for "How it Happens"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The richest of men is not more fortunate than he that has enough for the day, unless his good fortune attend him to the grave and he finish his life in honour. Many wealthy men are fortunate, whilst many of only moderate riches are blessed by fortune. The wealthier but less fortunate man is indeed better furnished with means to gratify his passions and to bear the blow of a great calamity. But if the other is less able to do these two things, his happy life saves him from the need to do them.

-Solon to Croesus, Herodotus (I, 32)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place and the like.

-Christopher Smart

 

 

 

 

Here I am deaf and dumb. When I walk through the streets I see every person in his shop employed about something. One makes shoes, another hats, a third sells cloth and everyone lives by his labor. I say to myself, which of all these things can you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game, and go to war, but none of these is of any use here. . .I should be a piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to the whites, and useless to myself.

- Little Turtle on his visit to Philadelphia, 1797