(cello and violin playing) (wood scraping) - I'm Paolo Marks.

I'm a violin maker here in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

For me, it all starts with the design of the violin.

There's a lot of tradition.

They've been made for over 400 years.

Of course, everyone has a little bit different process.

Mine has changed over the years slightly.

I mean, the end result is the same, as far as, you know, you end up with a violin.

Now I'm not trying to copy an instrument, Stratvarius or Guarneri exactly.

There are people who try to do that.

But I take inspiration from them.

I start with measurements.

The violin is, if nothing else, is based on proportions.

And it's not just so that it looks nice.

The violin is a vibrating space.

You make the proportions right, that air inside will vibrate really well.

(violin plays) (saw spinning) So the violin-making stuff is concentrated around the work bench with the hand tools.

You don't need that much to make a violin.

Chisels, gouges, some customized knives, rasps, files, clamps, a glue pot to heat up the glue.

You know, with that and a couple other things, you could make a violin.

Over time, you refine your tools, and you don't just have three gouges.

You get six.

So you have different radiuses.

The band saw is a time saver.

You can rough out the outline of an instrument quickly.

But you could do by hand as well, and just take a little longer.

(violin plays) So sharpening is a big part of violin making.

You might go as far to say that it's the difference between a mediocre violin maker and a good violin maker is the sharpness of his tools.

You know, the people who came here and settled in this area, I mean the violin, because it's small, it's easy to take on a boat from Scotland or England.

A lot of them made their own instrument.

You know, I've seen lots of amateur fiddles that served their purpose very well.

- We've pulled violins out of people's attics that were made out of old laundry detergent boxes and things, and just these tin or cardboard, the creativity that people will go to, the lengths people will go to, to make music.

I mean, people just have to do it, so they find a way.

- They were great with tools.

You had to be, you made log cabins, you farmed.

We think that people from hundreds of years ago were somehow different than us.

If anything, they were smarter in many ways, but they were really in tune with nature.

They knew the material so well, and how to alter them to their own purpose.

Back then, you couldn't just listen to the radio.

Couldn't put on a CD or anything.

So if you wanted to hear music, you needed to have a live musician, (axe chopping) (oven door closes) I'll play maybe a local tune here from the area.

You might've heard the Cranberry Glades is nearby.

And this was a local tune called Cranberry Rock.

(violin plays) (wood scraping) The order that you do things makes a big difference.

I'll draw it out.

I'll make a form out of plywood or another type of wood.

That's disposable.

It's not part of the instrument.

After the form is made, the first thing is to glue the blocks in.

The upper block, the lower block and the four corner blocks.

And then to bend the ribs or the sides around them.

And the ribs are only one millimeter thick.

So it's easy to steam bend them around a hot iron.

(violin plays) - Sometimes I wish our lives were a little tidier.

Not so much sawdust.

I think there's a certain level of chaos that you live with if you're a creative person, and that you have to become comfortable with, and I'm not always comfortable with the level of chaos that creeps up in our lives, but it's part of it.

And I think you take the good with the bad.

You know, our kids when they're playing music, they'll just drop something and the bridge will break, and they just walk across the hall, and anything we need to be fixed, we just put on Paolo's workbench.

You know, it could be a toy, it could be a violin, but you know, it has become a part of our lives.

It's really nice to have a violin shop in your house.

How great is that?

(band saw buzzing) - The next thing is to trace that form.

The garland is what it's called, the rib form onto a piece of spruce.

The two woods that are used almost exclusively are maple and spruce.

So spruce is for the top of the instrument.

Maple's on the back and the sides, as well as maple.

Ebony for the fingerboard, the pegs and tailpiece and chin rest can be ebony, boxwood, rosewood.

Just, that's a preference.

That's a aesthetic preference.

I've used maple from one tree.

I got a giant board of it.

Maybe a dozen years ago.

I've been making instruments with that specific board for the last 30 instruments.

The spruce is always made out of two pieces, and that's so that you have a book matched.

I mean, it's aesthetic, but also what you want to have is, in the center of the top where the bridge sits, you want to have the finer grain, tighter grain.

Every year, a tree puts out one growth ring.

And in the beginning they grow very fast.

They try to reach the sun.

But towards the end of their life, they're putting on less and less and less.

And the growth rings get smaller.

So you want to have those tight small growth rings in the center.

It's a little stiffer where the bridge is.

And then as it goes towards the outline of the instrument, you want it to broaden out a little bit and to become a little more flexible.

So that's for the sound.

You want it strong in the center, and more flexible on the outside.

So every piece has its own voice.

(violin plays) Both Erica and I, my wife and I, grew up as musicians in a musical family.

- My father was a strings teacher.

And so, I had lessons, I was classically trained in the cello.

- We're also lucky that our parents didn't force it onto us.

As far as forcing us to become professional musicians, there was never that pressure on us.

- I realized early in college that I wasn't going to make a profession out of it.

So it became more of a vocation, more of a hobby.

And I started playing more folk music and Irish music, and that was what I brought with me when I came here.

- I started as a cellist, went through music school.

And they have a program in violin making.

So after two years of doing performance, I switched to the violin making.

That was 20 years ago.

(strings music) One reason why violins can last as long as they do, 400 years, is because of the glue.

And the glue that you use is hide glue.

It's made from the hides of rabbits or cows.

Hide glue has certain properties that make it perfect for violin making.

And it's been used for hundreds of years.

When it dries, it's very brittle.

It's very hard.

It doesn't have any kind of dampening to it at all.

So that's good for the sound.

You want the sound to be unobstructed as it goes through the instrument, no kind of muting effects.

Another advantage is the way that it breaks.

If you were to drop it, or if it swells because of humidity, or if it gets smaller, because it dries out, it will pop.

The glue joint will pop cleanly.

So it doesn't break the wood.

If you were to use a superglue or an epoxy, it would tear the wood, because over the life of an instrument, the top will be taken off.

The back will be taken off.

The seams will be re-glued a couple of times.

And since there's no damage, every time it pops, the violin can last.

(violin plays) I think it definitely helps to be a musician, to be a performer in violin making.

You know, once you finish an instrument, you can play it.

You have an ear for what you want to change in the sound for your next instrument.

- There's a flow there.

And it's the same flow that happens, whether he's working on a violin, or a car engine or something, he's just looking for how to solve that next problem.

So it's very in the moment.

He's really working with the materials, whatever they present them, because the materials, the wood is so unpredictable.

And it's so variable that you can't just come at it with this one theoretical approach.

You just have to work with what's right in front of you.

And I think that's what he really excels at.

- Like any physical thing, you get into the zone, you know, they say in sports, but it's the same with playing an instrument.

It's the same with making an instrument.

I find I do my best work when I'm thinking about nothing.

You know, like all of a sudden, I'll just look and wow, you know I've completed this entire section.

I hadn't even really been thinking about it, you know.

(wood scraping) (violin plays) Well then you'll set the neck in.

Every other violin or cello that you see, it has what's called a scroll on the top, the spiral.

It has no real purpose other than aesthetics.

I asked one of my teachers once.

And he said, because it's the hardest thing to make look right on an instrument.

You actually cut a mortis into the block.

So you actually recess a space in that top block, and set the neck in there.

The neck and the scroll are all one piece of wood.

It's carved out of one piece.

It is so proportional.

And it's a design that you see in nature all the time, in seashells and snails, and fiddlehead ferns.

this spiral.

If you make it wrong, you see it immediately.

You see it's wrong.

It has to be perfect for it to look right.

A maker can show his stuff you know, kind of brag a little bit with his craftsmanship.

(dog barking) We have three girls and they all, well, the two older ones are playing violin now.

And the youngest one will probably start this year.

Something that they have seen from day one, they've seen their parents play.

- And I hope it's something that the kids pick up on.

That we are not just consumers of entertainment, that we can actually create and participate in it too.

(violin plays) - So they're called F-holes, very creative name for them.

But the old F sort of looked like that.

Very flowing.

They're very critical to the sound.

If you were to change the position of the f-holes slightly, you can drastically alter the sound of an instrument.

And that's what the great makers did.

They changed their f-holes over time, how they angle in, the length of them, the thickness of them.

It's infinite, the variations.

And they were trying for a specific sound.

You know, they're trying to make the sound a little more focused or warmer.

Music and violin making went hand in hand.

As the violin repertoire became more virtuosic, they needed to play faster, higher, project more.

And so the violin makers responded by changing the instrument to make it suit the music.

(violin plays) The bridge is right in between them.

And they serve to make this island more flexible.

And as the bridge is set into motion, when you pluck the string, it rocks back and forth and it rocks this island back and forth.

And that sets the whole top in motion.

And everything is working off of each other.

Everything is related to each other.

The air on the inside, the internal air volume has to vibrate, and it moves up and down.

And without having a space to be free, to pulse in and out, it would sound muted.

A classical violin concerto, when they play in front of thousands of people, they're not amplified.

You know, they're just on the stage and they have to project to the very back seat of the auditorium.

So projection is a huge part of what players are looking for in an instrument.

- Eight ninety.

And you are grafting something that we have to get onto that.

And then 10 years later, you have a nice tree.

Take a cutting from that, and you root that cutting.

- That's pretty difficult.

Not like a heated seed bed, that you can let it sit for a year.

And you might only have twenty, thirty percent take of roots.

- And there are just so many people here who can do things with their hands.

I mean, that's just what really impressed me.

The skill with cooking, the skill with growing food, the skill with working with fibers.

There are a lot of lost arts still tucked away in places, and I feel like we have more than our share around here.

(violin plays) - I mean, varnish is a subject that we could talk about for weeks.

So the varnish has a lot to do with the sound.

You can really ruin the sound of an instrument, if you put a very thick varnish on, or a very hard varnish.

You have a resin which comes from trees, but you can't just put that resin on.

It's hard and crumbles, and there's no way to apply it to wood.

If you cook down a resin, it becomes soft like honey.

And if you add linseed oil, it may combine in a way that when it cools, they're still combined.

There's no color added to this.

It's just the resin.

A lot of people add pigment dye into the actual varnish.

But anything you add into the varnish makes it more opaque.

You know, it makes it cloudy.

So I try to avoid that as much as possible.

You can make it have the perfect amount of flexibility.

Because you don't want it too hard.

You don't want it too soft.

You have a nice range of flexibility with the oil.

It makes the sound less harsh oftentimes.

And you need to put it in the sun for it to dry.

You need UV light.

(violin plays) The strings themselves were made out of gut, from the intestines of sheep or cows, and a lot less tension on a gut string than today's metal.

A lot of strings have a metal core, either a metal core or a synthetic gut core, but they're all wrapped with a metal winding.

You can get a lot more tension on them.

And because of that, projection is increased.

(string music) - Having moved around a little bit before I moved here, I realized how important it is not to take a community for granted.

(string music) We found a community full of artists and compassionate sustainably-minded people, who were very welcoming to us.

(string music) We can call the neighbors who are within walking distance when there's a lot of snow, and we can get together and pick a few tunes.

And that kind of keeps us sane, I think.

It's a good outlet for us.

And it helps build the community.

(string music) A lot of people think of rural communities as this monolithic group of people.

And this area definitely is not like that.

And so because we're a small community, we really learn how to roll with everybody's differences and how to be really accepting and accommodating and just see people on a human level, instead of on a political level.

- The natural beauty of the place, for sure.

But also there's a very rich community in this little valley here.

A community that respects working with your hands and making things, self-sufficiency.

So it was kind of like a river that was already flowing that I just slipped into.

So it was a good fit that way.

Plus my wife moved here.

So I have to, I followed her.

(string music)