The tone of aged wood, hand-crafted quality, hype, and history all play a part in maintaining a healthy interest in vintage musical instruments. Gregg Miner took on the challenge of collecting, restoring, and recording 100 musical instruments on his two-volume CD set, Gregg Miner: A Christmas Collection. Most of the instruments he chose to work with were turn-of-the-century, American-made stringed instruments. Many were obscure hybrids, or zany combinations of instruments, like banjoleles, and harp guitars. Four and a half busy years of researching, restringing, and retuning followed.
Collecting Vintage Musical Instruments for Miner’s Christmas Collection
Like many musicians, Miner finds a cool vintage instrument hard to resist. Around 20 years ago, he had a few dozen instruments — some working, some not. The collection was ordinary, but then Miner decided to do something extraordinary.
He began filling in his collection focusing primarily on vintage string families. One by one, he restored, researched, then learned to play each instrument authentically with the goal of recording each once in a collection of holiday arrangements. But which vintage instruments should he seek out? As most musicians know, vintage has a wide scope in the musical arena.
There are the Stradivarius violins, the Martin Guitars, and the Loar Mandolins that command five or six figures on the auction block. These are the vintage musical instruments musicians hear about but rarely touch.
Then there are those instruments musicians pool their pennies to obtain -- A Gibson A-3 mandolin, a Kalamazoo tenor guitar, a B&D Silver Bell banjo. Their tops survived a century of string tension. Their wood swelled and shrunk through dry winters and humid summers. Their badges of honor are the repaired cracks and dings from the accidental bump or scrape. Most agree they only get better with time.
Finally, there are the vintage instruments musicians happen on at pawn shops or swap meets. Even in their prime, some were playable, some not as much. The lower value means cracks go unchecked. Their original strings wear a coat of rust. These are the zithoharps, ukelins, and banjo mandolins few recognize, fewer learn to play, and many resign to wall hangers.
Though Miner’s collection boasts more than a few favorites in the vintage arena, many of his instruments hail from the latter group and are virtually unheard-of today. After listening to this recording though, it’s easy to see what the vintage craze is all about. Miner’s passion for even the most obscure and bizarre instruments is infectious.
Restoring Vintage Musical Instruments for Miner’s Christmas Collection
Miner is fine with being termed a “vintage snob,” but he’s certainly not snobby when it comes to the vintage instruments he collects. “Almost every instrument I get either needs some work or is totally trashed,” he says. “I restore it, get some sound out of it, and then see what it can do.”
Finding the 100 rare vintage musical instruments to record the album was easy compared to the challenges that followed. Every instrument had to be restored and then restrung. “Thousands and thousands of strings,” laughs Miner, “and of course, some of these strings might have been 100 years old. To play the instrument authentically, I had to get strings that in some cases don’t exist today. Some of the strings had to be custom made.”
Recording Miner’s Christmas Collection With Vintage Musical Instruments
Even when the vintage instruments were restored and wearing sparkling, new strings, Miner still encountered set backs. “Because they were antiques or more crudely made, a lot of the instruments were just impossible to keep in tune,” remembers Miner. “I had a digital tuner plugged into the output of my mixer, and was literally checking the tuning of the strings between each take. They could go out of tune that quickly.”
Despite the quirks, Minor still stands by his Museum of Vintage, Exotic, and Just Plain Unusual Musical Instruments. It’s the individual histories within each instrument which keep him intrigued. “Very rarely, you have a known story,” he explains, “but even if you don’t, you have the imagined story. Who in the world built this? Who owned it? Who played it? Who were they, and what did they do? These people are worlds apart from you. There’s that aspect lurking within every instrument you hold. On top of that, instruments are works of art visually. They’re sculptures of three-dimensional craftsmanship, and then, of course, they make music. What more do you want?”
Interested readers can check out similar articles covering -
The story behind the vintage instruments and recording of Gregg Miner: A Christmas Collection,
Techniques enabling Miner to learn 100 rare and exotic musical instruments for the recording,
The equipment Miner used to multitrack 100 musical instruments in his home recording studio,
And The Miner Museum of Vintage, Exotic, and Just Plain Unusual Musical Instruments.
Quotes taken in conversation with Gregg Miner January 2011.
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