New tools, old ways help Duluth violin builder create an ancient sound
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
Quick Read
In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
Dan Larson loves the stories his handbuilt instruments carry. The wood that becomes a violin, a lute or a baroque guitar holds a story of how it was collected, often decades ago.
“That’s what I find really interesting about it. It’s just the stories that the instruments have, and then they go and they get played by people and then they have other stories that they develop,” said Larson, 70. “And I think that’s cool.”
From a modest workshop in Duluth, Larson and nine of his Gamut Music employees build stringed instruments and craft gut strings from the intestines of sheep and cattle, creating a sound that reaches back to the 16th century.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
He’s known internationally for the beauty and sound of his instruments, yet he is not a musician. Larson said he played guitar as a teen, but realized he would never be a musician. He “plucks, but doesn’t play” the instruments he creates. But he brings a lifelong passion for history and an artisan’s eye to the work, and the sound follows.
Born in Texas, he was 18 when he decided he wanted to build violins. He found a school in London, England, and spent three years learning the basics. “When I started making instruments, I became enamored with the idea of the historical violin,” he recalled.
He spent years researching violins constructed hundreds of years ago and soon expanded to other early music instruments, including the baroque guitar and the lute. In the mid-1970s his wife, a lute player, wanted to study early music at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, so he made his workshop there. Most of the wood for his instruments comes from old growth timber in Europe or the Pacific Northwest.
‘How you doing today, Mr. Gut?’
As he built and sold more instruments to early music aficionados, Larson discovered a problem.
Players were complaining about the sound. The problem was the strings. While historically accurate, the gut fibers he used in the ‘70s were made more for stringing tennis rackets than making music.
“Music strings need to be soft. They need to be supple. They need to vibrate freely. It was just not right,” said Larson. “l couldn’t find the strings that I felt were necessary.”
It led him to more than a decade of research and experimentation in a quest for the perfect gut string. He consulted with musicians. He tried different techniques to replicate the strings made long ago until he found the sound.
Gut strings are made from the small intestines of cattle and sheep. They arrive at Gamut Music cleaned and salted. Workers sort the intestines by size. Then several, depending on the size of the string, are twisted together and dried. A finishing machine sands them to a precise size with a smooth finish.
“It takes about eight weeks to process a string. So we’re constantly making strings all the time,” said Larson, holding 3-foot strands of gut. “We never close the shop.”
The shop follows a recipe, but making gut strings is more art than science. Humidity, temperature and variations in the intestines must be accounted for.
“The process of making strings is really easy, but the art of making strings is really, really difficult,” said Larson. “It’s sort of an alchemical process. You have to really be in tune to what’s going on with the material.”
“You have to look at it and you have to feel it and see, you know, how you doing today, Mr. Gut? Are you getting too stretchy?”
Gamut Music turns out thousands of gut strings a year, in dozens of sizes, each made with obsessive attention to quality.
“My name is probably more associated with the strings at this point than the instruments,” said Larson. “Name any country, and we probably have sold strings there at some point or another.”
Professional lute player Edward Martin has played gut strings for 40 years. He’s also a consultant for Gamut Music, fielding questions from customers around the world.
“There’s a certain soul and sweetness that comes out with the sound of gut that no synthetic string can make,” said Martin.
“It takes the flesh of an animal to bring out the soul of man,” he said. “Imperfection of that material in itself just reveals a more beautiful sound.”
He won’t name-drop, but Martin said some of the top string players in the world have told him they use Gamut Music strings.
“It’s just a different sound,” said Larson. “Once you start playing a gut string, once it gets warmed up, once your fingers get warmed up, they just have this tactile quality that the players describe as like their fingers become part of the string, part of the instrument.”
Some strings are also wrapped with fine wire to sustain the sound they produce and make it brighter. The wire wrapping machines in the shop were custom built by a string maker in Illinois in the late 1800s and Larson believes they are the oldest such machines in continuous operation.
Illness has slowed Larson for the past several years, but he says he’s regaining his strength. There’s a pile of wood on his work bench waiting to become violins, and he has plans for a set of lutes with a four seasons theme.
After 50 years, his passion for building instruments is as strong as ever. He’s passing his knowledge of instruments and strings onto his employees so the work will continue beyond him.
“I work all the time. I work here at the shop, and I have a workshop at home, and I work in the workshop at home, usually a couple of hours before I come in here in the morning,” said Larson. “And then when I finish up here, I'll go home and make some dinner and go back down and work some more.”