Until 1984 I made only baroque recorders and a few so called Ganassi instruments, which are more or less modern instruments based on Fred Morgan's famous design. I had also made a few renaissance tenors, for people wanting to play solo music with a limited range, but it was only later that I started to think about making complete consorts. At that time, I was living temporarily in a huge farmhouse in the South of France and I had enough time for the necessary development work and prototypes. This was necessary to turn the information and measurements that I had, into working instruments. By the summer of 1985 I had my first small consort ready and took it to Vienna to compare with the instruments there. I spent the following winter developing the big instruments and sold my first full consort in 1986.
For many years all my consort instruments had completely round, turned blocks, a feature that I saw on some of Bob Marvin's early instruments and had liked the sound it gave. This method of construction is a very difficult way of making recorders, because the window and edge have a very tight radius, the same dimension as the bore of the recorder. It is a truly horrific job to carve with normal tools and even using special scrapers, it is very delicate work. Later I felt that the advantages in the sound were small compared to the extra work involved and the difficulty of achieving consistent, stable results. Stability, because the edge is so large and unsupported, that it is inclined to rise when the instrument is played, causing all sorts of problems. Finally, I changed the design around the end of 1993, to the more normal construction.
For my first consort, I used the normal baroque fingering for the ninth note - - 2 - - - - - instead of the open fingering I had seen on the museum examples. I some-what regret it now because I think it was laziness on the part of myself and my earlier customers. The problem is that instruments larger than the basset in f, need to have open fingering anyway (the thumb hole otherwise becomes too large) and I find this lack of uniformity and unevenly balanced alternative fingerings, a pity.
Recent developments with the consorts have concerned themselves with trying to make the keys as quiet as possible and making the low notes of the basses stable.
An ongoing question is that of temperament and I have over the years changed my ideas about this considerably. I tend nowadays towards a more equal system, but of course I try as much as possible to discuss these questions with my customers in advance.