Ben Hall:

At the beginning of the tour we had been in Sydney for around 10 days and the weather was glorious ~ but now we were seemingly well stuck into Autumn, and the weather was truly dreadful the day I went to meet Ben Hall, as interesting a woodworker as you will ever come across.

A woodworker is often the more interesting when he/she is NOT just a woodworker. As most musicians will testify, the most creative and interesting musicians are often the ones who are also interested in wrought iron work, zebra breeding or Saxon poetry and who's heroes are sculptors or, if actually musicians, at the very least musicians who play entirely different instruments, and in a different idiom, to their own.

Ben Hall is one such woodworker ~ he is also an artist, an architect [his original day job, and sadly most woodworkers have to admit to knowing all about them] and a musician ~ a guitarist. He studied with Oliver Hunt in London in the 60's.

For a classical guitar maker and player he doesn't like classical guitars much. He has always found them to be unsatisfying instruments, too quiet and difficult to play to be really rewarding [which is why he never pursued a career as a player] but it has led him to experiment with the fundamental construction. He had two finished guitars in his workshop when I visited him, both very much the same design ~ shown here.

The three distinguishing features of these instruments are:

1] The top is sloped just underneath the top end of the neck facilitating access to the top few frets, much as a cutaway does on a steel-strung guitar. Strange, says Ben how a traditional classical guitar never has a cutaway, despite the fact that the repertoire often demands use of the top frets, and a steel strung guitar always does ~ but the top frets are seldom if ever used! I agree.

2] The necks are detachable ~ this is to facilitate repairs should they become necessary.

3] The sound hole is square ~ he just likes them that way - and why not.

As an instrument maker there seems to be some confusion over his name ~ the elegant labels in his instruments say 'John Hall' but I ~ and apparently most others ~ know him as Ben. He actually doesn't like having two one syllable names and would far rather have been called David Rubio.

He favours quite a low level of decoration on his instruments, choosing to concenrate more on the choice of appropriate timber and the function of the instrument. The level of decoration on the one and only surviving Stradivarius guitar is far closer to that of his violins than to the majority of other contemporary lutes and guitars ~ this backs up Ben's contention, and I wholeheartedly agree, that most of the finest instruments from the past are relatively plain in their appearance with the very ornate, and often less musically satisfying instruments being reserved for less competent ~ but wealthier ~ amateurs.

As we fly out of Sydney on our way to Adelaide, I get one last glimpse of the Harbour Bridge, surely one of the most beautiful and spectacular bridges in the world ~ and it occurs to me in a rare moment of ... something ... that in a sense this bridge is like a really good musical instrument ~ a near perfect marriage of form and function.