[Ken Smith]

Text:
I've always been musical and a natural mechanic, so when I turned from preaching in the United Brethern Church, I looked about and it struck me that, since there seemed to be so much racketeering in the business world, the best thing I could do was to develop the very finest stringed musical instruments that could be made. Of course that meant first, the violin. The tone of the violin has always been high-pitched. What I wanted to do was to develop an instrument of powerful tones. Along about 1910 an immense change in the world of music began to be noticeable. It was then the standard pitch began to go down. There was a firm in Chicago doing a half million dollars worth of business that now does about three or four thousand. The fall in the use of violins was terrible. There were some teachers here then, a man and his wife, who had about 600 pupils and about 40 teachers in their institution. They dropped to him and her and ten teachers. Then they went to Hollywood.
With the advent of the radio, music changed. The high soprano voice and the high-pitched instruments, like the mandolin and the banjo, are no good on the radio. You never hear the shrill-voiced old Italian violin any more. The most popular instruments today are the saxophone and the double-bass viol.

There's no good or bad wood in making musical instruments. Any wood is all right. It's the way you use it. It is all nonsense, that talk of special wood from Europe. Appearance now counts for a lot, too. I won $450 once an a wager. I was to make three violins, one of standard material, one from a dry-goods box- - Ontario tamarack -- and the third from a camphorwood chest. The judges were to listen to each of them being played in the dark, and if they could notice any difference -- know when the violins were changed -- I won the bet. They couldn't detect any difference in the tone of those three violins, and they bought them for $150.00 each. That was the wager. But not one of the three but what was made different from the other, so as to allow for the relative stiffness of the wood.
Now take the guitar. I was up in Canada for two or three years, and when I came back in 1911 the guitar was most in favor. I went to work to make the finest guitar possible. In it I used crossed veneer for strength and resonance. It took the first prize at the New York Exposition, and I sold then to all the big factories. I used yellow fir with white for brilliant tone, and California redwood, with rosewood and Australian lacewood for the top. The father of the lacewood tree is said to be the oak, and its mother, the mahogany.
Freak instruments aren't as popular as they were years ago. Once there, was a young man here in vaudeville at the old Marquam theater. He was a genius, who appeared under the name of Motzarto. The program showed a solo by him on a one-stringed violin. It was really a cello. He wanted to know if I couldn't make him a real one-string violin. I did and he took it with him to Europe, and brought it back with him to Cincinnati, his native city. He died not long after he returned from Europe, and the City of Cincinnati today has that little one-string fiddle in its museum.

Violin players sometimes lose what is known as their "tone" ear for getting the major scale. I worked out a plan for a player who suffered that loss by placing frets, tiny cross pieces of inset steel on the finger board. He used that for two years.
It was in 1906 that I took an order for a German zither. That was for vaudeville too. They wanted the zither on legs, with a solo slide overstrung scale 1 1/2 inches longer than the regular. There wasn't any such fingerboard in existence. The Philadelphia firm I wrote to said no such a thing could be made in tune. Well, I got my old calculus out -- I never was very good at mathematics at best -- and I sweat blood trying to get the differential for a semi-tone, and finally I worked it out. As a matter of fact I found the formula in an old [Harper's Magazine,?] under the section of the "Editor's Easy Chair." After I got the formula, I had to make the tool, and here it is. It is what I call a proportional divider. It is made of steel, with the longer arm 11 inches from the exact center of the pivot to the extreme and of the point; the short arm is one inch, to give 1/18. The formula for semi-tone in a musical instrument is that each semi-tone be 1/18 and 3/1000 less than the preceding one. Spreading these two arms keeps the exact proportion of the semi-tone.

Here's something else I'm doing to produce the depth of sound now wanted. On guitars I place the sound-holes on the edge of the face to aid in giving volume. And here's a mandolin with a rounded back, that I turned by hand to produce the "roll" in playing. I took this instrument out to a mandolin-player friend of mine in the hospital, when it was finished. His eyes just lighted up when he saw it. He played that mandolin the last thing he did, then he put it on the pillow beside him, so they told me, and went to sleep forever.
There was a violin player here in Portland about 1912 that was a natural. He was an Italian hunchback, nineteen years old and only about four feet tall. I used to listen to him. He didn't have a decent violin -- a three-quarter, no tone affair, and his arms were too twisted to handle it properly, so I modeled a violin for him, making it so that without shortening the scale he could make the reach. I brought him down to my shop and I said, "Guiseppe, here's a violin for you." (His name was Guiseppe Amato.) He took the fiddle without a word, only his big, wistful eyes shining, and he went to a corner of the shop; and there he played, without stopping, for more than an hour. He played out his very soul. He made that violin wail and laugh, while the tears ran down his cheeks. He just couldn't believe it was for him. He had to go and get his father because he was afraid his father might think it was a game to make him pay money for the violin. I forgot to say the boy played on the street. It was just three days later, and he was playing on Ben Selling's corner -- I think it was Fourth and Morrison -- and Ben Selling came out to listen to the boy. I said to Ben, "Ben don't you think its a shame such genius as that hasn't a chance to develop." Ben answered, "Well, what do you think?" I said, "Well if I was Ben Selling, and I had as much money as he's got, I'd send that boy to Italy to study." Ben laughed. But just one week later that boy was started on his way to Genoa. He studied hard, but he wasn't very strong, and he only lived four years after that. The world lost a great musician in his death.

Once when Fritz Kreisler was playing here, he dropped in to see me. He had his Stradivarius, valued at $25,000 with him. There was some little thing he wanted done on the violin, nothing of great importance. I said to him, "Sit down, and let me finish this while you're here. I don't want the responsibility of keeping this." So he waited. He is a friendly sort. His concert was due two days later, and on that evening I went up to Graves Music Store, on Sixth street, about six-thirty o'clock. And there in the window was the old Strad. I thought that was funny, so I waited around till ten o'clock that night, and that old Strad was still there in the store window. I saw Mr.Kreisler after the concert, and I said to him, "Mr. Kreisler, do you always give your old fiddle absent treatment?" And I told him about seeing it in Graves' window. Kreisler looked kind of sheepish, as he laughed and said, "That damned fiddle, I forget him." He actually used a new violin he got in Montreal.