A Talent for Making Instruments Sing Again

The big stand-up bass, burnished the color of bourbon and trimmed in deep ebony, was made 30 years ago in Nuremberg, Germany, by the Johan Rammer family, for generations a respected supplier to orchestras throughout Europe.

Somehow, it was the fate of this double bass to end up in the Simi Valley School District. And somehow, it had its neck ripped off, its back cracked, its interior drenched with a liquid that may well have been Orange Crush.

It now stands, cultural car wreck that it is, in a cluttered garage, where somehow, a Ventura fireman named Roger Morgenthaler will make it work again.

Strike up the band. Truly.

Morgenthaler is a guy who plays no music. He simply fixes the quirky, high-strung things that make it.

“Each one’s different,” he says. “Each instrument has a history. Each has its own problems.”

Such as the violin that got run over by a car, or sort of.

Before leaving home, its owner had dutifully packed it up in its hard case but left it leaning against the car. When he backed out of the driveway, Thump. Panicking, he pulled forward. Thump. He sheepishly showed up at Morgenthaler’s with a pile of highbrow kindling wood.

“That one was pretty bad,” says Morgenthaler. “Actually, it was crushed. But it was not splintered, which is where you draw the line. Everything was simply broken. The case did a good job of saving it from total destruction. I was able to fix it in, oh, about a week.”

*

Morgenthaler is an unlikely contractor. He likes country and bluegrass music, some classical. He not only doesn’t play an instrument, he can’t tune things by ear. He does know when things sound nice, surely, but he’d be the first to say he couldn’t recognize a D-sharp if you paid him.

Getting things right, then, is tricky.

The invisible physics of an instrument are his guide. In the Rammer double bass, for example, the sound post is a dowel-like pillar within the body connecting the front to the back. Though it looks like a girder, it has nothing to do with structure. Instead it conducts sound from the vibrating strings to the curvy rear wall of the instrument, which in turn vibrates like a loudspeaker diaphragm, radiating the bass sound forward.

But the post is unforgiving. Misplaced by a mere eighth of an inch, the instrument will lose volume, coloration, tone, personality--it will go dead. Morgenthaler taps the plastic handle of a chisel along the interior rear wall, listening for that elusive spot where nature’s grain and maker’s curve meld into the hardest, most rigid stratum. It will act as sonic epicenter.

He finds it. It is the size of a nail head. And that’s where he’ll affix the sound post.

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s real critical where that little sucker goes.”

Morgenthaler’s jocular words betray the delicacy and precision of his hand and the fixed gaze of his ice blue eyes. He’ll tell you in a minute that he just fixes things but then, in recalling 25 years of music’s reconstructive surgeries, will surge with excitement as he describes the moment when he knows an instrument can sing again, whether in D-sharp or B-flat:

“The vibrations of the sound run through the entire instrument--and through your hands. I just feel it. The entire thing resonates. It’s really beautiful when that happens.”

*

Twenty five years ago, Morgenthaler’s son took violin lessons. His son’s instructor was 75 and suggested that Morgenthaler, a relatively new Ventura fireman who was good with his hands, start learning the craft of replacing violin strands.

Morgenthaler did, but not without discovering that there were few books available on the subject and no commercially available tools. So he made his own tools, ordered horsetail hair from Mongolia and Canada, and gave things a try. It worked. The local music shops immediately took him on as a subcontractor for bow repair. Today Morgenthaler’s bows--made from scratch of high density, Brazilian Pernambuco wood--start at a relatively low $500.

But it wasn’t long before the son’s teacher showed his ulterior motive in getting Morgenthaler started. He showed up at the Morgenthaler house one day with a big brown bag containing very old wood, metal and string pieces. It would turn out that all the pieces, many of them broken or cracked, puzzled together into a violin--the violin that had been played by the teacher’s dead father.

It was Morgenthaler’s first real repair job, and a big one. It not only required an understanding of the mechanics of the instrument but also the many things that could influence sound: glue choice, finish density, overall flex and rigidity of the body and neck. When he felt the thing become a virtual satellite dish of sound reception and reflection, he considered it done--maybe. Whether it would play a D-sharp that Stravinsky might recognize was another thing.

The old violin teacher picked up his father’s instrument. He drew the bow, pulled out some long breathy notes, then some fast bright notes. He stopped playing. He wept.

And that’s when Roger Morgenthaler knew he had done something right. Or, as only Morgenthaler would put it, “It was then I decided maybe I had a feeling for this. It’s a feeling, really.”