Prier Violin Making School

May 10, 2007 at 3:29 PM

I put in a thirteen hour day Monday and took a violin in for an appraisal at Prier (Preer) violin making school in down town Salt Lake City, Utah. It is a four hour drive from here to Salt Lake.

While I was there, I went through the school. There were young men and women, about 2/3 to 1/3, and they were in all stages of building cellos and violins. I can tell you real quick I would rather build a violin than a cello. Cellos are huge and take about fifty clamps to clamp the plates to the ribs. One mother told me the starting price for cello's in S.L. - $4,000 and I can see why. Even the scroll work is huge. You see several students with pip-squeak chisels working on violins and this one little gal with this huge thing gouging away on her cello scroll.

There was a steady stream of instruments coming into the shop for strings one third off , an upside down violin and a bow thing on the door was the door chime and kids just loved that arrangement. People in for new bows, etc. Mr. Prier has operated the shop for 41 years and the love and affection for him from the public was quite noticeable. There are more Baldwin pianos in the Salt Lake Area than in any other place in America.

The Mormons are "into" music and start their children out young and one mother told me once a week she comes to public school and takes her daughter out for part of a P.E. class and part of a science class to take lessons from the #1 violin teacher in the city.

I have flown a Cessna once in my life when my good friend that teaches flight training took me up to go to Salt Lake. He turned the craft over to me and went to sleep. I had never flown in my life and it was bumpy over the mountains to S.L.

I say all of this to say this: in the spring time, there is no other place on this earth as pretty as coming (flying) into the S.L. basin with the Wasatch covered with snow and the valley lush green with flocks of different species of birds in great swells down on the marshes.

I have been spraying and fighting joint weed on my irrigation ditches for five years. Guess what Prier uses for the finishing sanding for all their instruments? Dried joint weed/grass with the ends cut off and that makes a tube and you breathe out through it about three times to just barely get some moisture in the inside to hold it together for making a scrub pad with just the right amount of dirt in there to polish and the fiber carries off the wood chips.

From Armand Allégre
Posted on May 10, 2007 at 4:20 PM

Is it bad when I saw the title I thought the post was going to be describing the experience of playing violin while high on marijuana?
:(

From Robert Berentz
Posted on May 11, 2007 at 1:52 PM

Thanks Armanda, I changed my title. I fight weeds so much I didn't think about the other issues.

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