As mentioned on the front page of this site, I am now learning how to play the hurdy-gurdy. I am very fortunate to have an excellent player/teacher living only about an hour and a quarter away from me. What is even better is that the same chap is also a maker - and a fine one. Therefore when I decided to put my money where my mouth was, this paragon of hurdy-gurdy playing usefulness was the obvious choice. Step forward and take a bow - Mike Gilpin! Illustrating the usefulness of the Internet, Mike's name and email address were given to me after I put out a plea for advice on one of the newsgroups. Shortly after contacting him, I arranged to go and see him and have a lesson. This was something I had wanted to do for years. I duly went along and actually made a noise on a gurdy for the first time, using Mike's own instrument. This was about September 1999, and I have been going weekly ever since. Shortly after starting, Mike told me that he had been in touch with Chris Allen (another UK maker) and that Chris had a hurdy-gurdy available. Well I wasn't ready to commit to buying an instrument just then, but Chris very, very kindly offered to lend it to me! I borrowed this instrument (a little guitar-body in D) for about six weeks and returned it to Chris at the Early Music Show in London at the end of October, where he duly sold it. This six weeks worth of practice was invaluable to me, and my huge and sincere thanks go to Chris for lending it to me. More useful advice was given to me by Neil Brook, so a thank you to him too! Contact details for Mike, Chris and Neil are in the 'Links' section. Of course, now I was gurdyless again. However, during the course of my lessons at Mike's I had been watching the progress of a luteback he was making for a customer, and was very impressed with the quality of his work. I sold the kids into slavery and now had enough money to commission Mike to build me my very own instrument. Since I see him every week for my lesson I have been able to watch the work progress, and have taken my digital camera along each week and taken a few snaps. On the following pages you can see how it went. I hope this is as interesting for you as it has been for me! Oh, and you can click on any of the pictures in the diary to see a lager (and probably more useful) version of the same picture - have fun...

Deciding what to buy and getting started