All beginnings are difficult

Language confusion

Dialects are one of those things...
In the area where I grew up - my former home - there was also a dialect that was a bit "special". It wasn't Swabian (which is now even known in Berlin), but it was called "houalouärisch" - or let's call it "hohenloherisch".Of course - I understood that - I had grown up with it.

And then I came to Fulda. No more of that southern German singsong, everything sounded a bit harsher to my ears. But that wasn't a problem.
Until I had my first day at work.

If you want to learn how to make a flute, you start "right at the back" - cutting wood.
Next to the saw, I was assigned to Egid - my colleague for the next few days.
Egid made a real effort to speak High German with me.
And I didn't understand a word.
I eventually found out that Egid came from a village in the Upper Rhön - and they didn't speak East Hessian there, but "Rhöner Platt". Just his language.
We didn't have it easy together in those days - and not just because of the language. It was also a clash of two cultures. The student who had fallen on hard times and the Rhön part-time farmer.

I still remember Egid's eyes very well. He had such a completely undisguised, straight gaze.
And "his" village - I later lived there for a few years and set up my workshop. And got to know lots of incredibly lovely people - and learned some Rhön dialect - just a little...
But by then Egid was no longer alive - unfortunately. I would have loved to have visited him.

Almost an apprentice

Yes, there was no apprenticeship as a recorder maker. I was hired to make recorders sound.

But to my delight, I was first allowed to go through the whole business from "back" to "front", getting to know all the stages in the creation of my dream instruments.
And finally learned how they manage to get the hole in the middle of the wood. It's quite simple: with a few technical tricks you can get it relatively straight. And only then do you clamp it in the lathe and it turns nicely around the hole. Quite simple really.
In the woodturning workshop, of course, there were no woodturners standing at lathes and working the shape out of the wood with their hand tools. There were machines with templates and molds for the decorations. Of course - instruments for schoolchildren could hardly be afforded otherwise.

Nevertheless, one day a week I was allowed to stand at the hand lathe and produce shavings. A square piece of wood needs to be rounded first - by then you have a lot of shavings in your hair. And then you work out shapes - it's almost finished, and then this turning steel goes "RITSCH" - and you can think of another, slightly thinner shape.
Over time, it worked better and better and I practiced turning a flute head or a foot. Or - not so easy - a centerpiece that is really smooth and not a roller coaster.
Wow - that was fun!

There's a lot more to flute making: the parts need to be polished - definitely not my favorite part of the job.

And then they have to be turned into recorders.
The headjoints needed a wind tunnel and a labium - later also a block. Another huge machine park - various planing and milling machines.
There was no CNC technology back then - it was still pure mechanics, with all its pitfalls. Depending on the mood of the tools used, the results were sometimes better, sometimes more difficult. But it was usually only afterwards that the people who were supposed to make the heads ring.
See later.
The lower parts wanted handle holes. I was impressed by the drilling machines that drilled a whole series of holes in one go in one part. And that had to fit. You can't retune a school flute individually - see "affordable". Even today, I still have great respect for this type of flute making: all the precision that goes into finishing a handmade instrument has to be "built in" right from the start - as well as it can be.

The first recorders - laborious

And then the time had finally come:
My first day of finishing.

Finish carving the labium, insert the block and get the first notes out of the instrument until everything was good.
And I had no idea how to do it. Of course, I was instructed: file it like this, and then it has to look like that, then finish it with sandpaper here, then try it, and it should be fine.
But it wasn't.

I didn't know that there are many tiny details that matter. And - with no offense intended - my later impression was that hardly anybody at that time had any idea of how it all related.

They had brought me in for the reason that I was able to play the recorder - they needed me to do it better.
So all I could do was "learning by doing".

After the first day working, the master came and looked at what I had created. His comment: " They don't work at all!".
Pooohhh - I was fed up.

Things went a bit better with soprano recorders the other day. And for a long time I was carrying around a kind of "alto recorder trauma".

I guess I've overcome that fairly well with the years...