I have been making instruments and tinkering with woodworking in general for 20 years now. My first foray into woodworking started in middle school, where I began simple projects such as woodburning and relief carving on scrap boards of pine, carving wood sprites and birds in pieces of firewood, and traditional wooden bowery. I eventually stumbled into the world of cultural wooden instruments with the Native American style flute and shakuhachi. My first flutes included a simple Native American flute kit, a shakuhachi-inspired bamboo flute, the panpipes, and others.
After this, I became absolutely hooked on wooden flutes, always scouring gift shops for NAFs when our family went on trips, purchasing poles of bamboo for shakuhachi making, and eventually (and rather unssuccesfully) attempting my own split-bore NAFs with a small router table. In fact, my first ocarinas were a wooden inline and a custom wooden sweet potato ocarina purchased a few years later from the legendary maker Charlie Hind. Over the years I began expanding my interests in all types of wooden instruments, crafting everything from split-trunk didgeridoo, to taiko drums, Finnish kantele, Chinese guqin and erhu, and leading to the culmination of my experience with a now award-winning custom tsugaru shamisen that has become recognized amongst the international shamisen community. It has been this interest in instruments and instrument making that has afforded me many wonderful opportunities over the years, and has allowed me to make many friends from around the world, and is even the reason to how I met my incredibly loving and supportive wife. As I worked on instruments on and off over the years, and growing my own collection of instruments I have experimented with, I eventually began feeling that it may be time to share my passion and craft more with others, and perhaps start making instruments for other people.
I officially founded Bretti Musical Instruments in 2024 (on the side of my full-time day job as a research engineer at a particle accelerator facility) from this lifelong and ongoing passion and fascination with fine wooden musical instruments. First starting with my own modern wooden Chinese xun design, I eventually expanded into various types of high end wooden ocarinas, gemshorns, and historical replicas of rare woodwinds. My workshop is a small and humble space located in my basement, where I painstakingly craft each instrument by hand over the course of months. My free time and thoughts are constantly consumed with new woods and wood combinations, new instruments, and new designs. My goal is to not only share my passion and craft of wooden instruments, fine woodworking, and rare woods with other musicians and enthusiasts around the world, but to express my own unique aesthetic and push the craft of these instruments to new levels through a uniquely open and honest approach, while merging traditional and modern techniques with art, engineering, and craftsmanship.
