Robert & Orville Milburn, USA
Orville and Robert Milburn are a father-and-son luthier team who live in
a small town in the Willamette Valley of Western Oregon. About their
work they write the following:
We began building guitars in 1989
simply as an interesting and challenging father-and-son project. Bob was
a pharmacist by profession and Orville a retired building inspector.
Orville brought years of woodworking experience as well as his years
spent as a piano technician during the 1970's to our luthiery work.
Orville had played classical guitar for most of his life and passed on
the love of the instrument to Bob.
During the first years we
built a small number of guitars, keeping the first and selling the
others. Orville was friends with a number of guitar teachers at the
time. It seemed that as soon a guitar was finished there was someone
there who wanted to buy it. We didn't make a lot of money, but it showed
us that there was value in the work we were doing.
Till that
time, we patterned our guitars after instruments we could examine or
borrow. We bought or borrowed every book on classical luthiery we could
find (the Internet as we know it now did not yet exist). It soon became
apparent, however, that working in isolation would be an amazingly slow
process. As a result, we sought out Jeffrey Elliott and Cyndy Burton for
instruction and consultation. We also formed a friendship with John
Gilbert and other luthiers who were close by.
It was through Jeff
Elliott that we came to love the Hauser style instrument. It was an
easy decision to move in this direction with our own instruments. To us,
Hauser style instruments have a clarity, balance and almost magical
quality that we strive for in our guitars.
In 2007 our growing
friendship with luthier Gernot Wagner gave us some new direction. Gernot
had become willing to share his double top knowledge with us. In
short, his methods are designed to increase the volume, projection and
presence of the instrument while retaining traditional sound quality. At
this time we had come to believe that nature could not provide wood
that was optimal for making a guitar top - that is, wood that is both
light enough and stiff enough. Double top technology allows the luthier
to enhance what nature has provided.
To us, luthiery is an
interesting balance of art, craft and science. We don't believe that any
one simple, formulaic method is very useful, but we do believe
scientific methods are the key to repeatable, successful instruments.
Careful observation can lead to the development of a hypothesis.
Well-designed experiments can then be used to test an hypothesis. And
the results of these experiments can be incorporated into new
instruments. In this context we don't look at any one instrument as an
end-point but rather a point along a continuous path of learning and
refinement.