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We link to over 400 pages on acoustic guitar building, electric guitar making, violin making, dulcimer making, mandolin building, and all other types of lutherie; pickup making, winding, and rewinding; flute, recorder, and bagpipe making; brass instrument building and repair; drum making; experimental musical instruments construction and design; as well as pages on woodworking, metalworking, and guitar finishing and refinishing. We list these webpages as a service to folks visiting The Musical Instrument Makers Forum, whom we assume are here because of an interest in building musical instruments. Therefore these links are heavily weighted towards pages that provide information for instrument builders and musicians, with a few non-musical sites we have found useful thrown in for good measure. We do not include commercial sites that are little more than advertisements for a particular product or service but only link to sites that are themselves valuable resources and/or have useful links pages. Note that overseas sites may load slowly, or not at all. We hope you find these pages useful and will e-mail us if you find any broken links or have new links to recommend.

Please DO NOT ask us to link to your website unless it includes significant online instructional resources for instrument builders, and is pop-up free! We're not interested in promoting your website, but in helping our members and visitors find online information about how to build musical instruments. Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to discuss instrument making we hope to see you on our Forum!

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Links Pages Contents
Page 1:
Acknowledgements
For The Builder
General and Miscellaneous
Strings
     General Lutherie
     Acoustic and Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars
     Other Fretted Instruments
     Non-Fretted Stringed Instruments
Electronics
Woodwinds and Brass
     General Interest
     Flutes, Recorders, and Whistles
     Bagpipes
     Brass and Other Horns
     Reeds and Reed Instruments
Page 2:
For The Builder, Continued
Percussion
Keyboards
Woods and Woodworking
Finishing and Refinishing
Tools and Toolmaking
Music and Instrument Links
Specific Instrument Links, alphabetically by instrument type
Other Music and Instrument Links
Other Useful Links

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For The Builder
General and Miscellaneous:
  • The Musical Instrument Makers Forum, the Web's only interactive forum for the discussion of musical instrument construction, design and repair; welcoming builders of all instruments at any skill level from expert to wannabe.
  • The MIMForum New Builders' miniFAQ: answers to the questions most frequently asked by those who are new to the art and craft of building musical instruments, written by the MIMForum membership. Also see our new BuzzFAQ: how to find and fix that pesky buzz.
  • Dennis Havlena has instructions for building lots of low-cost instruments including hurdy-hurdy, kora, kalimba, tin whistle, banjo, bagpipe, etc., with photographs of some completed ones. Bet you never knew there was a ready-made didjeridu sold at K-Mart for 97 cents!
  • Jon Tirone has several pages for the DIYer devoted to descriptions of repairing broken guitar necks; building a mandolin, electric guitars, and a banjo; and making pickups and other electronics.
  • Tim Escobedo's FolkUrban Music Page. An eclectic collection of instruments that are cheap to build, including a $12 ukulele, a $5.00 clarinet, a kora, etc.
  • Luis Angel Payno has a Spanish-language website devoted to short photo-essays accompanied by simple plans for making all sorts of mostly-Iberian musical instruments, from a wooden-shoe fiddle to a friction-drum to a cow-horn flageolet (or maybe it's an ocarina). The pictures and plans make his website well worth the visit even if you can't read Spanish. There are instructional pages on several bowed and plucked instruments, gourd instruments, whistles and flutes including a slide-whistle, noisemakers, a string drum (accompanied by a longer article and more extensive instructions and plans), reed instruments and instructions on reed-making, drums, and some bagpipes and chanters. Some instruments are very simple, others very complex, if you have any woodworking or instrument making experience you'll find something there that you can build.
  • Bonny Lundin-Scheer's Crafty Music Teachers website has instructions for making a number of simple instruments to use in the classroom, including a bass marimba, rainstick, shakers, and key chimes. There are sound clips so you can hear the instruments. Some of these are simple enough for your students to make in the classroom.
  • Some very simple instruments you can make with kids (scroll down).
  • This image-heavy page on metal spinning will be of great use to wind builders, and to resophiles who want to spin their own cones. There's also a page on forging your own tools. Still under construction, but worth a visit.
  • Dan Bruner has plans for building simple PVC instruments, mostly winds, with one entry in the PVC percussion genre as well.
  • French-language website with pictures and a few dimensions of string and wind instruments, as well as a few sound files. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage for a block of links to internal pages.
  • Acoustician David Canright has several articles on, among other things, building a justly-tuned guitar.
  • Robert Tedrow's webpages on building a concertina. The formatting really, really sucks - why so many people assume that everyone else owns a monitor the same resolution as theirs is beyond me, but if you have larger wide-screen monitor, or can handle the maddening irritation of having to scroll sideways several dozen times for each of the 12 pages, the web pages are detailed and very informative.
  • Donald Nichols has a website devoted to (English) concertinas, including a page on reed tuning, and a detailed tour of the inner workings of the English concertina.
  • A procedure for correcting warped, broken, bent, stripped concertina endscrews.
  • Here are some pages on mechanical speech synthesis: Voder audio samples, History and Development of Speech Synthesis.
  • The Mechanical Music Digest has a number of technical articles available online, covering such subjects as rebuilding a player reed organ (long, and detailed), building a simple PVC organ pipe, and making a wooden organ pipe.
  • The Acoustical Society Of America has a number of astonishingly wide-ranging articles online, including some on the acoustics of musical instruments. On their homepage, see the "Lay Language Papers" presented at this year's meeting, and scroll down to "Archives of Previous Meetings of the ASA" to see the lay language papers presented in years past. A truly fascinating website!
  • The Physics of Music page of the Michigan Technological University Department of Physics, a few pages of simple wind-related theory and DIY projects, with some temperament information.
  • Kettering University's Daniel A. Russell, Ph.D., has posted a number of pages on acoustics (scroll down). Subjects include Animations for Teaching Acoustics and Physics and Acoustics of Baseball Bats (yes, updated since the Sammy Sosa incident), as well as more usual fare relating to guitars, pianos, and tuning forks. And he's a Wallace and Gromit fan!
  • The Acoustic Research Team of the University for Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria, has posted a bilingual (English/German) website with research papers and software of interest to brass and reed instrument builders and players; and has recently added some research papers on violin-family instruments and bows. Their software offerings include a Musical Calculator and a Brass Instrument Analyzing System. The BIAS program is available as a demo, and one of our members reports that it is useful.
  • Downloadable tuner, "tuning fork," and metronome programs for Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, XP. The tuner is also available in a Mac version.
  • Freeware Test Tone Generators, be sure to download from a reputable source.
  • SweepGen, "turns a PC into an audio oscillator and sweep generator which can be used for testing audio or educational purposes. In conjunction with audio test instruments, you can make frequency response plots."
  • Spectrogram, a freeware audio spectrum analysis program.
  • winISD, freeware speaker designing software for Windows 9x/NT environment. You can design closed, vented and bandpass boxes with this program. It also allows you to calculate few different types of filters.
  • The Official United States Patent and Trademark Office website, including how-to-register information. Use their search engine for a look at what other people have done/are doing, and how.
  • Google Patent Search, new, and our members like it better than the USPTO website.
  • Google.com image search, for pictures of instruments.
  • The Museum of Musical Instruments website includes an interactive virtual exhibition of Dangerous Curves: Art of the Guitar, a terrific exhibition that was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, from November 5, 2000 through February 25, 2001; Bound For Glory: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie; and more.
  • The Library of Congress has posted some sketches, mechanical drawings, and plans of folk and ethnic musical instruments including an oud, a Georgian tar, a zurna, a quanun, a dumbeg, and many more instruments. You can download very high quality digital images. In several cases there is enough information for an experienced builder to turn the information into an instrument.
  • Musikmuseet, Swedish Museum collection of European instruments and plans, including several hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa plans, plans for a hummel, and for the Swedish bagpipes (säckpipa).
  • America's Shrine to Music Museum in South Dakota has one of the best instrument collections in the world. Links to other sites, especially other museums, and a source for plans of bowed instruments. Be sure to take the virtual tour, and pay homage to the "Rawlins" guitar by Antonio Stradivari, one of two documented guitars by the famous Italian craftsman known to survive.
  • The Music Museum of Paris has a terrific collection of photographs and other information online, but no list to browse through so you need to know what you're looking for in order to use their search engine.
  • Two other good links to plans and museum collections are CIMCIM and their Technical Drawings of Musical Instruments in Public Collections of the World page; and Edinburgh University's Collection of Historic Musical Instruments plans page, including their new Portfolio of Drawings of Mouthpieces for Brass Instruments.
  • The Musikinstrumenten-Museum der Universität Leipzig seems to be trying to post an online catalog of all the instruments in their collection, and they're well worth a look-see. Navigate using their site map to find their collections of citterns; guitars built by Richard Jacob Weissgerber, a fascinating and innovative builder; guitars built by other makers; and zithers, including one with an amplifying horn and another with a pedal-driven strike mechanism if I got the translation from German right. They seem to enjoy collecting unusual instruments there - you'll have fun looking around! Click on the images for three larger views of the instrument, where available.
  • Conservation OnLine, resources for conservation professionals.
  • The chronological listing of the Fellowship of Makers and Researchers of Historical Instruments (FoMRHI) Quarterly Contents.
Strings:
General Lutherie
  • The MIMForum has several sets of full-size plans contributed by Forum members: see the list here.
  • Have a pesky buzz you can't identify? See our new BuzzFAQ!
  • Makoto Tsuruta's bilingual Japanese/English "Crane" website has free downloadable plans in PDF format (8.5" x 11") for Baroque and other early guitars, and an Italian mandolin dated 1735. Not all webpages have been translated into English. There are lute and lute rose plans included in the not-yet-translated lute page, just look around until you find them: if you put your cursor over the links, all the file names are in English. One member has successfully completed a lovely Lacote copy from the Crane plans.
  • Paul Butler has devoted several pages at his website to the process of researching and building early instruments: rebec, citole, medieval viol, and Anglo-Saxon lyre. He has made downloadable plans available for the rebec, citole, and lyre (the lyre plans are very small). A warning that the rebec and citole pages are HUGE and image-heavy.
  • Patrick Willoughby's pages on making a rebec and simple bow including a very clever method for cutting the wood for the rebec bowl economically.
  • Watson Bailey Instrument Co. has a number of plans available for free online as PDF, GIF, and Corel Draw files. Archtop guitars, a classical guitar, archtop mandolins, and a resonator banjo are included. As the carved-top instrument plans don't include arching templates we don't know how useful they'll be - none of the plans looks particularly complete but you may still find some use for them.
  • Stewart-MacDonald's Trade Secrets, Free Info, and In-Progress Repairs pages.
  • Repairman Frank Ford's frets.com website has numerous articles of interest to fretted instrument builders. One of our members' favorite sites.
  • The Luthiers Interactive of North Texas has posted articles and tips for luthiers at their website.
  • The Musikinstrumenten-Museum der Universität Leipzig has lots of interesting pictures of citterns, guitars,and zithers, click on the "Musikinstrumente" links on that page to see them, then click on the thumbnails for larger pictures and detailed descriptions.
  • Many of our members have inquired about applying a decal to the headstock of their instruments. Here's a page on making a waterslide decal.
  • Chladni patterns in vibrated plates. See also these pages related to plate tuning using Chladni patterns: on violin acoustics and a page on mandolin plate tuning.
  • This odd YouTube video shows rice dancing on a vibrating plate and forming fascinating patterns as the sound frequency is increased.
  • Eric Jansson's book "Acoustics for Violin and Guitar Makers" is available online in PDF format.
  • Jonathan Sevy has posted a few lutherie resources, including some Mac and Java software, a page on dished workboards, and some Excel spreadsheets.
  • Andrew Mowry has posted a downloadable Neck Geometry Calculator spreadsheet for arched-top instruments. Calculates the bridge height, neck angle, height of the neck surface above the headblock and string break angle, etc.
  • Jon Whitney's downloadable wfret Windows fret calculator is by far the most popular fret calculator among our members. It will print templates for fret slot cutting and includes non-standard equal temperament scales (10-tet, 16-tet, etc.), as well as diatonic scales for mountain dulcimers. Our members have found that template output from a wide variety of printers is extremely accurate. About 3 meg in size, in compressed ZIP format. Also available is Jon's older DOS fret calculator.
  • Douglas Sparling's downloadable freeware Windows 95/NT Fret Calculator and online fret calculator.
  • Chuck Kish's Excel spreadsheet fret calculator.
  • Dave Pushic's Word document templates for 24.5", 25", 25.5", and 34" (bass) fretboard scale lengths.
  • Arto's String Calculator is an online java program that will help you determine optimum string diameter for a given note and length.
  • Wayne Cripps's online String Tension Calculator for gut, savarez, and nylon strings. Also includes a Baroque lute string calculator.
  • Yet another online tension calculator, The McDonald Patent Universal String Tension Calculator.
  • AP Guitar Tuner is a freeware Windows program you can run on your PC to help set and check the intonation of your guitar if you don't already have a tuner.
  • Contemplating some decorative inlay? Visit Sean J. Barry's three-part discussion on stringed instrument pearl inlay technique.
  • Hide Glue FAQ.
  • Leif Luscombe's article on How to Prepare Hide Glue.
  • More than you ever wanted to know about Carbon Fiber, often used by stringed instrument makers as trussrod material.
Acoustic and Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars Other Fretted Instruments Non-Fretted Stringed Instruments
  • "Antonio Stradivari His Life and Work (1644-1737)" by W. Henry Hill, Arthur F. Hill & Alfred E. Hill, originally published in 1902, has been republished online. Lots of pictures.
  • Derek Roberts has documented the process of building a violin, with lots of pictures and some explanatory text.
  • Violin builder Hans Johannsson's violin making homepage, and construction page with links to pages of violin-family dimensions.
  • Pete's Violin Making Page might be useful for people who want to know what tools are necessary for starting out in violin making.
  • The late David Rubio has a number of technical articles on the violin posted at his website. His article on making madder lake has sparked many discussions on the MIMForum.
  • The Southern California Association of Violin Makers has a number of violin-related articles online (scroll down).
  • The Violin Makers Association of Arizona International has some articles about violin bass bars available online, as well as an article on the method of violin rib molding used by the Mittenwald School of Violin Making. There seem to be no internal links to that article.
  • Violin builder Richard Thomas has posted a program for creating arching templates, both cross arching profiles and longitudinal arches.
  • Leif Luscombe's article on How to Set a Sound Post.
  • Lars Kirmser's illustrated instructions for Fitting the Bridge of a violin, viola, cello, or bass.
  • An in-depth, illustrated lecture by Roger Hargrave on Classical Edgework.
  • Carleen M. Hutchins and Duane Voskuil's CAS article on mode tuning for the violin maker.
  • Félix Savart's trapezoidal fiddles have been a subject of great speculation on the MIMForum. Here are some photographs from the Music Museum of Paris, and a small copy of a set of plans from 1819. A related violin by William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), click on the image to see the full instrument. Here's another Mount violin, this one guitar-shaped.
  • Violin maker Joseph Curtin has posted several articles at his website including one on using a reciprocal bow to test violins, and another on principles of violin setup.
  • Violin maker Otis A. Tomas has posted an article on the Pythagorean Tradition, a method that utilizes the "golden mean" of proportional design, a concept that often comes up when discussing violin design.
  • Stephen Mann's CCycloid, a program that lets you generate and print out curtate cycloids, a type of curve used by some violin makers as the basis for arching templates. For Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows ME; there is also a Linux version available upon request.
  • Don Reinfeld's short overview of bowmaking. This page takes a long time to load as the image file sizes are enormous!
  • Bowmaker Andreas Grütter has posted an online bowmaking book, "A Bow on the Couch." This thoughtful builder has also posted the book as a PDF file for easy printing.
  • Smithsonian Magazine's Saving the Music Tree, an article in PDF format on the work being done to save the Caesalpinia echinata tree, the pernambuco, from extinction.
  • The Violin Acoustics pages of the School of Physics, The University of New South Wales.
  • Online Violin String ID Search, by silk wrapping colors, and presence or absence of rings.
  • The Connecticut Valley Historical Museum exhibition entitled "Inventors and Violin-Makers of the Pioneer Valley" has been posted online as a virtual tour. “The exhibition reveals how the early technologists in the Pioneer Valley applied their specialized skills to making violins and established a new self-taught profession of violin making. It shows how a handful of self-taught violin makers, who became successful professionals, trained apprentices and employees in the art of violin making. It exemplifies the stylistic link between master and pupil which forms a related school of work. Generally, it illuminates the creation of the 'American School.'” Worth a look.
  • The Violinmakers School STRADIVARI of Cremona, Italy, has a photo album (no text) on how to make a violin. It's rather cumbersome to get through.
  • David Wiebe has posted a Documentary Photo Essay on building a cello.
  • Making a double bass, a detailed photo-essay by UK bass player Bob Hitchings on making a bass from plans based on the book by H.S.Wake, "To Make a Double Bass," occasionally available from the MIMForum Bookstore when it's in print. Bob also now has a book available.
  • Laurent Legeay's bilingual (French/English) pages on building an electric upright bass, complete with downloadable plans in "tiled" PDF and compressed DXF formats.
  • Yatzy's description of building his Electric Upright Bass. Brief, but there just isn't much online about EUBs.
  • Jameel Abraham's oud building photo essay. He's builing free-form, no mold; neither the website nor the instrument is complete yet.
  • Downloadable plans in PDF format for a Swedish Tagelharpa, from a website in Spain (!). You'll need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  • Patrick Woolery's pages on making a simple lyre.
  • Online plans for a hammered dulcimer, with instructions for building from the plans.
  • Online plans for a hammered dulcimer stand.
  • Andrij Birko's bandura webpage is a page briefly describing building a bandura of his own design.
  • Victor Mishalow's English-language translation of a manual by Ivan Skliar on making the Kyiv-Kharkiv bandura, extensively annotated. Unfortunately he was not able to reproduce the illustrations. Many of the internal links at that website are broken.
  • The Ancient Lithuanian Kanklës (Kanteles) website includes a section on construction with plans for 5-string, 8-string, 10-string, 11-string, and 12-string kanklës, in GIF format you can download and print out. Be sure to explore the site thoroughly so you don't overlook any of the plans. Various tunings for the instruments are posted, as well as pages on playing technique with some downloadable sheet music in GIF format, and sound files with both samples of the tunes and complete tunes. A very enjoyable, complete site, although navigation aids could be better. Take care not to miss anything.
  • Greg Whitcombe's very detailed photo-essay on building two hurdy gurdies.
  • Another photo-essay on building a hurdy-gurdy.
  • Two pages on hurdy-gurdy setup. The first page is devoted to the chanterelles, the second to the trompette string.
  • Nigel Eaton's article on hurdy-gurdy setup and maintenance.
  • David Smith's website is devoted mostly to photo-essays of hurdy-gurdy construction, good illustrations but minimal text, the use of a third-party photo host is annoying but it's still worth a look. Hurdy-gurdy, dulci-gurdy, banjo-dulcimer, and a copy of the Mora harpa, the oldest extant nyckelharpa, are covered.
  • Olympic Musical Instrument's page of resources for hurdy gurdy builders.
Electronics: Woodwinds and Brass:
General Interest Flutes, Recorders, and Whistles Bagpipes Brass and Other Horns Reeds and Reed Instruments

Continue to Page 2

Links Pages Contents
Page 1:
Acknowledgements
For The Builder

General and Miscellaneous
Strings
     General Lutherie
     Acoustic and Electric Guitars and Bass Guitars
     Other Fretted Instruments
     Non-Fretted Stringed Instruments
Electronics
Woodwinds and Brass
     General Interest
     Flutes, Recorders, and Whistles
     Bagpipes
     Brass and Other Horns
     Reeds and Reed Instruments
Page 2:
For The Builder, Continued
Percussion
Keyboards
Woods and Woodworking
Finishing and Refinishing
Tools and Toolmaking
Music and Instrument Links
Specific Instrument Links, alphabetically by instrument type
Other Music and Instrument Links
Other Useful Links

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