Prices: September 2008

It is very difficult to decide a fair price for your work, and recorders are no exception, given that two identical instruments can take widely different times to complete. Perhaps surprisingly, wood has very little to do in the calculation, even if factory recorders are often priced accordingly. A piece of grenadilla or boxwood may cost six times more than a piece of maple, but their cost rarely exceeds 10% of the instrument, and so can be disregarded in this respect. My more popular instruments, baroque altos, 'Ganassi' recorders etc, tend to be cheaper than instruments I make less often, simply because per instrument they are somewhat quicker to make. For the cylindrical recorders for example, the tuning takes a very long time and is rather difficult to do, so these instruments are more expensive. The risk factor also plays a part here, these instruments can be completely ruined if care is not taken with the internal bore adjustment when tuning. As this is the very last job to do on these recorders, any slip can spoil many hours work. The bigger an instrument is, the more time it takes and hence the more expensive it is, simply because the amount of material to be removed is so much greater. I decided with the first consorts that I made, not to make the big basses too expensive, because I felt they would otherwise never be ordered. So my bigger instruments work out probably cheaper per hour than the smaller, the large basses in a consort being subsidised by the sopranos and altos. An exception to this rule is the small baroque instruments, which are so fiddly and require so much care to make, that I make them the same price as my baroque altos.

All prices are in Euros (€) and are subject to change without notice.

Baroque recorders

Renaissance cylindrical consort recorders a=520 Hz ("Virdung" Model)

"Rafi" recorders a=520 Hz

"Dolcimelo" recorders

Renaissance conical consort recorders a=466 Hz