A Craftsman's Legacy: The Brass Horn Makers

[Music] there's more than one way to leave a legacy for some it means plaques monuments and halls of fame but for others legacy comes from a place more simple [Music] the Ford f-150 a proud supporter of a craftsmen's legacy sometimes it's the simple designs that escape me for instance I've never really thought about why there's so many bends in brass horns I'm sure there's a purpose outside of just being cool I'm an Indiana visiting Ric Seraphin off Rick is not only a fine craftsman he's also a historian and a professional musician I'm pretty certain Rick's gonna be able to answer any questions I have about horns a craftsman battles for perfection never willing to give in or walk away I'm Eric gorgeous I build custom motorcycles using skills passed on by countless generations before me I used to work nine-to-five chasing money and titles and it nearly broke me so I started over I decided to work with my hands to feed my soul please join me on a quest to uncover the skills that build our society we'll discover what drives the men and women who I call my heroes we'll learn their craft and maybe even find some inspiration along the way there's a part of you in everything you create your legacy a craftsman slays [Music] so you're a bit of jack-of-all-trades aren't you I do a lot of different things yeah I teach at the University and and I'm a French horn player and I make all these horns that you see around you they're beautiful they're amazing how'd you get into it I mean you how did you get into playing I should say because that's probably where it started right I started playing the trumpet in elementary school and I did that all the way through high school not very well and then I discovered the French horn in high school and it just was a good fit what was it about the French horn that that I guess for you to it first do I like the sound of it okay and and I also like the music that the horn plays and there really is a lot more I may be bias about this but there's a lot more you can do with the French horn that's really fun yeah then with the trumpet and how about you how did you find your way into it well when I was a small child my dad took me to Cleveland Orchestra concerts I grew up in the Cleveland area okay and I fell in love with the sound of the French horn as well and so I started taking lessons it just the sound of it the sound of it I love middle voices in the lower voices and I also liked the solos and the orchestra parts that the horn had alright at what point did you decide that music was your was your love and you were going to become a professional musician it was at the end of high school that I had to make a choice of what I was gonna study what I was gonna major in as a college student and I thought give it a chance give it a try and then what happened after that I played in the Opera Orchestra in Detroit and that I played in the Toledo Symphony and for three or four years and then I decided I needed to get a better job I needed a little more education so I came to Bloomington to Indiana University to do a master's degree were you making horns at that time I started out putting together horns from pieces of modern horns but without valves so the old horn doesn't have valves that's the difference between the old and the modern horn okay and you can take apart an old horn and take the out of it and it's sort of plays like the real thing and that's what I did in those days how did you get into the point where you're actually starting to make your own horns though when both of us started playing with early music groups groups at play on instruments of different periods it became necessary to really have good instruments ones ones that were authentic in their dimensions and then I had to start learning some serious metal work and serious design and do some serious study you follow vintage techniques to correct I try to some of my machines are run by electricity the drawing machine that we use a little bit later and the lathe I don't have an apprentice who can turn a crank to make the lathe go but but it's interesting that in the world of brass instruments that they sort of have to be made by hand usually the instruments that I'm copying are pretty well known okay and horn players will know this is a really fine instrument and it fits the bill for this period because what I need to do is cover different periods of music like from 1700 to about 1750 the music of Bach and Handel takes one kind of horn but the music of the second half of the 18th century Mozart and Haydn takes another kind of horn oh ok and then their horns from different countries there are English instruments and German instruments and French instruments alright and makes a lot of sense do you work together on the horns we do he does the bulk of the work but having smaller more delicate hands I'm able to do some of the finishing work and some of the patient polishing and preparation of the bells and scraping of solder and some of the little details that you know make the horns almost look like jewelry by the time they go out of here sure I would think that your horns are probably so all over the world I've had a lot of horns go to various European countries and to Japan to Australia South America does it make you think about your legacy much it does these horns will last for a long time the originals have been around for two and three hundred years so I'm hoping mine will be to share the people take good care of them and play them and use them in concerts and recordings but really that's part of a legacy those are physical objects but there's a more important part of legacy which is students because I've got 30 years of students who are out there playing the French horn professionally or doing whatever they're doing musically and I have at this point three people who have apprenticed with me here and so passing things on I think is is more important legacy than then making a horn or playing a concert yeah I would agree with you so how do you see yourself do you look at yourself as a craftsman or as an artist I think when I'm pounding on pieces of metal I'm a craftsman yeah because that's a tool in your hand and a piece of material and an idea in your head of what you want that material to become and so that's just total craftsmanship to me but when I'm holding the horn in my hands then it's a work of art but it's also a tool that somebody else uses to make some more art sure sure oh yeah yeah yeah when we play yeah so there's an old German saying it goes quince tis churn market have a feel our bite that means art is beautiful but it's a lot of work it sure is it sure is I think I'm about ready to get to work what do you think you wanna get your hands dirty absolutely okay let's go make something the natural horn was often used by European nobility to create a signal that would resonate through the countryside during hunts in the 1600s the 18th century marked a turning point as it began to be incorporated into classical musical compositions written by composers such as Bach Mozart and Beethoven with the invention of the valve the natural horn eventually evolved into the French horn though the instruments have become more sophisticated with time many of the techniques for making them have remained relatively the same for hundreds of years and have been passed down from master to apprentice Rick and Celeste Seraphin offs passion for the sound of the original instruments has led them to keep these techniques alive and pass them down to future generations well this looks like a really nice horn that's a very old horn yeah this was made in Paris in about 1820 now what kind of horn is that this is a is known officially as a French classical Orchestra horn I thought instead of trying to make a whole horn which takes quite a long time we would work on a restoration project this horn has now been restored the dents have been removed and it's been cleaned up so that it's playable except that it's not complete we need to have tuning crooks for the horn and you plug the crook in like that and now we have a complete horn oh I got you nice this crook will only play in the key of G so let's say I wanted to play in the key of F I would plug in a crook that now you can see it's 2 coils and it's about a foot and a half longer now you'll hear the difference and to play in all of the other keys you would need no 8 or 10 more so which one are we going to make today I think what we'll do today is make the simple one coil G crook for the horn I think that's something we can pull off in an afternoon and where do we start we start by making a tube so what you're gonna do first here is take the scriber hold down the pattern very firmly so it doesn't move and scribe a line on both sides to make the pattern that you're going to cut out okay and since we're gonna match up these sides over a man mandrel we have to be really critical with this right they have to really fit exactly you stand right on the line and we'll get exactly the dimensions we need this is an old-fashioned very slow-moving workshop it's nice gives you time to appreciate what you do but the box of tools that I have here my hand tools that I used mostly are very much like what they would have had okay that's beautiful how's that look yeah that's great I know okay okay so now we have a bit of a problem and that this metal is not very malleable it's quite stiff so we're going to kneel it exactly awesome yeah I'll show you the the color to which we need to go it needs to be a dull red okay though the difference between dull red and bright red isn't very much and bright red turns into melting okay not good [Music] they'll read and then I move on immediately as soon as I reach the dull red okay so I'm gonna hand this over to you [Music] alright perfect color yep No all right now hold it we now have a soft piece of metal and we'll just set it down here on these bricks to cool for just a couple minutes this is called the steel mandrel it's a tapered steel rod Wow and it has very exact dimensions turned into it on the lathe and this is the dimensions of the inside of the tube okay so what we're gonna do is we're going to start bending this over you can do it on on that end and I'll do this end and we're literally just going to bend this over the mandrel right and make this into a tube so we'll get the joint to be absolutely as tight as we can get it take it over to the to the soldering bench and put it on the fire brick and then and then we'll heat it up and do the silver solder joint you want to go to try certainly [Music] so I'll give you the wooden hammer first wooden hammer burnisher and file and you can go back and forth between those three okay [Music] okay that seam is looking good now this is a pretty crazy machine and what does it do exactly we're actually going to use it to make a tapered tube so we're gonna put the tube onto the mandrel like that alright and then we're gonna draw it through the washer putting a little lubrication on there a little lubricant and we'll screw it into the end okay now we'll just pull it until the end pokes through and then we'll be certain that everything's in order and that everything will draw smoothly alright it looks like it's pulling through right now so you can turn on the motor oh that's cool perfectly smooth and perfectly round but Wow something even cooler that's happening down here is that the tube is getting longer so if this tube will end up probably three or four inches longer than it was wow that much yeah this machine was made about 1979 by my father and myself so did you have a picture or something to go by or did you guys just come up with a design yourself well I had visited some instrument makers and seen similar machines mostly made by the instrument makers and I took photos and I showed it to my dad and he said let's do it so now we have our tube so our next step will be to anneal it again because it's been totally work hardened and then fill it with pitch and bend it and what is that pitch is a mixture of asphalt and pine resin because if the tube isn't supported it's really thin it's only sixteen thousand seven inch remember it totally collapses so now we can start bending and I'll bend it around a little bit and then you can continue the bend oh you're not even using any heat or anything no this is done cold and we pour the pitch in and it solidifies and then you can bend it at any point keep bending alright and here's our pattern you want it to look about like that and we'll take it off and compare it to the pattern in just a minute okay but you can do it by eye for the moment there you go how's that okay a little more so you don't want to get okay looking like that so go around a little bit more a little bit more yep until you have just this much oh okay yeah that's what we're looking for okay and now let's take it off of there and set it on the bench compare it to the to the pattern well you nailed that the first time just tweak it a little bit like this there's a very specific length to this right there is this crook the G crook needs to be exactly 38 inches long okay so what we'll do is a measure with the tape measure from the beginning and find the point that we want to cut off and we go around the outside this is not an exact measurement of length but it's a comparative measurement that I can reproduce okay and so we find 38 inches and mark it with a pen and then we can cut it off at this point so now do we have to get the pitch out of it right and that's done by heating it up and melting the pitch out and we can just step into the pitch we can do it under an exhaust hood [Music] it all burns away to so the pitch has been burned out of this and then it went into the pickling and now what's left what we're going to do is a polishing procedure so how do we do that and the first thing that we do is take one of these finely sharp scrapers mmm you find a sweet spot around the middle or so and you end up taking long thin strokes and every you'll very lightly use a very light touch and overlapping the previous stroke with the next stroke and that's taking off very very little very little you can't even see a bird yeah it's it's it's so but you can see it see it's getting shinier but if you notice it leaves fine little ridges as you do this but the next thing that you would do after these fine if you've made these fine lines with the scraper to get rid of those ridges you take a little bit of brass polish mm-hmm and steel wool now back in the day they would have used brick dust or pumice powder and a cloth to do this same satin finish that we're going to get now and then you just again with a light touch and you just rub over all of the scraper marks that you just made okay see it brings it up to a nice nice satin finish now that's a pretty finish but we want it just a little bit shinier and how we go about taking it to the the final level of polishing we take this curved highly polished burnish your furniture and we do we go about the same motion that we used with the scraper and as you can see as I do that you overlap each previous stroke can you see it getting shinier and glossy er as you go yep so that's what has to be done on this entire so it's good to take it's gonna take a little bit of time but we can work on this while Rick is at the lathe making the tenon oh great for the little pieces that get soldered onto this to start out with a scraper I can see I can see it getting shiny yesterday's [Music] [Music] I just finished this on the way this is the part that goes into the socket of the instrument and makes an airtight seal okay so that goes on the end of this and then this piece here does what this is a reinforcing sleeve that goes over the end of the mouth pipe okay and just makes it a little bit stronger that's another one that was seamed and drawn in the same way yep and what about this little ring here that little ring is yet another little reinforcement for the end of the mouth pipe and it's also very decorative and this looks like some kind of brace that is in fact a brace and it will go in here after everything else is assembled making the the crook stronger and more rigid sure sure sure and it looks like we have a last little bit there and this is the little label which was made of a little diamond and and stamped with the name of the key of the crook and this is a G crook and it's in French so this this crook speaks French so how do we put all this together now well we're gonna assemble everything with a soft solder the other soldering that you did was hard solder which is a high temperature solder this is quite a low temperature solder that consists mostly of tin with a little bit of silver and then once this is all together what's our next step but it's the last step yeah and that is cleaning up the soft solder joints because when you do soft soldering you invariably get a little bit of the solder running out the side and then Celeste will show you how to scrape away soft solder and then do the final polishing with steel wool and brass polish and then we're done plumber's no this is sweat soldering where you just apply a little bit of solder and the and the joint just sucks it right in [Music] takes in that flux better [Music] okay [Music] you know I've not played a horn before don't think it sounded the same man this is just amazing this is a beautiful piece beautiful thank you so much Brad yeah we had a great time I really thank you thank you it looks good brick and Celeste were so gracious with their time and their talents and once again I've proven to myself I need to stick with the drums [Music] [Music] [Music] there's more than one way to leave a legacy for some it means plaques monuments and halls of fame but for others legacy comes from a place more simple [Music] the Ford f-150 a proud supporter of a craftsmen's legacy to discover more about a craftsmen's legacy and the craftsman we feature please visit our website and you can also follow us on social media through Facebook Twitter and Instagram [Music]

Channel: A Craftsmans Legacy

Views: 16,882

Keywords: handcrafted, handmade, craftsmanship, music, instrument, horn, horns, brass, brass horn, orchestra, metalworking, metal, french horn, frenchhorn, handmade instruments, french horn music, french horn sound, french horn solo, brass instruments, brass instruments demonstration, brass instrument repair, brass instrument restoration, brass instrument cleaning, brass instruments and their sounds, brass instruments of the orchestra, eric gorges, a craftsmans legacy full episodes

Id: ZWgt4vcqq4U

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019