The Homemade Instruments of Charles Birch

The Homemade Instruments of Charles Birch

Charles Birch Playing his first Homemade fiddle.

I am an occasional member of the Watchet Makers Club one of the first meetings I went to, I met an elderly fellow Called Charles Birch and we got chatting and realised we both make musical instruments. He let me have is number and invited me over but I lost the number which annoyed me greatly. Anyway a year later he called me out of the blue so I finally went to meet him.

Charles Birch is a very healthy 86 years old and started making Instruments In the 90's  and is still kept busy with making and repairing and restoring folk instruments.

He makes fiddles, Cellos. Bowed Psaltery's, Ukuleles and upright double Basses. A friend of mine who I jam with has one of his Basses. It's a behemoth with an amazingly thumpy tone.

The first instrument Charles Made. A fiddle made from a chocolate Box.

Charles makes these with a few hand tools.   They are all built out of recycled timber with bought hardware.
They are solid as a rock and quite heavy but that doesn't detriment from the sound of them. Unfortunately I don't play fiddle or cello or bowed psaltery so my efforts where terrible. although The psaltery quite fascinated me.  Charles kindly demonstrated his skill at playing them for me. and they sounded great, much better than you would expect .

Charles playing his Cello
A bowed Psaltery


Another Fiddle

Its great to meet a fellow builder of "homemade" Instruments and amazing to think he has been building ans successfully selling  them regularly long before the current internet driven popularity.

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Comment by Jim Morris on April 4, 2016 at 2:03pm

Two Box Fiddles - not quite twin fiddlesThese are two of mine that are pretty similar to those of Mr Birch. I always like to try for a comparison of sounds between similar instruments.

Comment by Jim Morris on April 4, 2016 at 1:58pm

Thanks Antony. That's pretty slow uploading!

Comment by Antony Moggridge on April 4, 2016 at 10:29am

Thanks Ron :-D That's from almost exactly 10 years ago! 

Jim Yes I have a Video But just have to get around to uploading. It takes about 3 hours to upload even a short video where I am !

Comment by Ron "Oily" Sprague on March 30, 2016 at 3:47pm
Comment by Jim Morris on March 28, 2016 at 9:34am

Wonderful! I'd love to hear a sound clip or see a video of some of these great looking instruments.

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