About me
Hi, i’m Guido.
I’m a furniture maker by profession, but building instruments has been a part of my life since I was about 13 years old. Some of those early efforts include cookie tin banjo’s, flutes and a lot more. They did not always function as intended, but I learned a lot making them, and most importantly, I had fun!
Fast-foward and my skills as a woodworker grew, as did my understanding of the functioning of musical instruments. The first serious musical instrument I built about 6 years ago was a Igil, a sort of Mongolian cello which has a piece of goat skin for a soundboard. It is the exact same instrument that is featured on the slider next to this text. From that I expanded to Framedrums and eventually Tagelharpa’s and other string instruments.
Which presents the opportunity to tie this little piece of background information back to the name I have chosen to work under and part of my filosophy behind instruments. The tagelharpa was the first instrument I started to make as a production instrument. The Tagelharpa being a old Norse instrument. I felt it would be fitting to choose a name that pays a little hommage to where the professionalisation of a passion started.
Ratatosk is a figure that is shortly mentioned in the texts that make up what we could call Norse mythology. It takes the shape of a Squirrel and it carries messages from the top of the World Tree down to the roots, twisting the messages due to it’s own personality. To me this is also how a musical intrument functions: as a messenger to bring out what is inside, a messenger that still has it’s own personality which it adds to the original message.
