ST. LOUIS — Alvin Fry’s lifelong pursuit of stringed musical instrument knowledge began in 1980, when somebody stole his guitar. He took the $2,000 insurance settlement he received and bought a bunch of wood to begin building his own instruments, each improving upon the previous one.
“And within five instruments, that thing proved to be incredibly important. I was creating superior intonation, playability and balanced tone,” said Fry, from the basement of the Gray Summit home he shares with his wife. “I had trouble controlling power, which has been my struggle, and I've just finally put that all together. But that's what I've been manipulating now for over 40 years.”
Fry is no lightweight. He builds modern Baroque violins, violas, classical guitars, steel string guitars, multi-stream classical guitars, and more. And he has an impressive list of customers.
But he insists he is not a musician.
“I’m musically challenged,” he said. “I hate to say that. It just it just doesn't come to me.”
Still, Fry’s list of clients reads like a Who’s Who of Nashville and the performing industry.
“I built a guitar for Kenny Rogers’ guitar player. He told me, ‘I got to go home see how it records.’ Then he sends me a letter months later and he said, ‘I've never had a guitar that sounded perfect when I played it, and then when I recorded it, I got exactly the same sound.’”
The list goes on.
“I built a guitar for Willie Nelson,” said Fry. “Vince Gill said, ‘However you define perfect – these instruments fit that category.’ He told that to the Boston Globe. Who else? The Emerson String Quartet; Phil Setzer. He said my violins always had Stradivari quality sound, which I thought was an amazing statement. I did work for the Juilliard School. One of the professors was playing my violin and he said he never played a violin that good - not one built by a living builder.”
Fry has hanging on the wall of his basement reviews from a European violinist who played his violins at the Smithsonian Institution.
“She laid the Stradivarius down, picked up my violin and played it for three minues and she said, ‘This is amazing. How did you do this?’ So, I handed her each of four violins, and she's like, ‘Amazing!’ every time she played one. That's pretty exciting.”
What excites Fry, recently, is the notion of refurbishing violins, instead of creating these works of art from scratch.
“What I've been trying to figure out is the way that I could make dare-I-say the best instrument available at an affordable price that anybody out there can afford,” he said.
That’s not to say the ones he has already built are not for sale.
“Here's the problem,” he said. “People who buy instruments in the range of $20,000, $50,000, and $100,000 go to reputable places, not to some hillbilly that sits there and explains sound to them. They just blow it out. They just don't believe him.”
In the meantime, Fry will continue to pursue sound solutions.
“I have a violin over here that I experimented with in putting a different finish on it,” he said, pointing to three or four violins resting on top of an upright piano. “I have rebuilt it four times and refinished it five or six times, so…“
So, apparently the search for sound will continue.
Fry has his own website. He has also written a book on the topic, titled “How to Make a Violin that Sounds like a Stradivarius.”
“It explains everything I know about the construction,” he said. “That's half of the book. The hard part to explain, which is the second half of the book, is why it works.”