Background

My Step Mother was born in the Vosges Mountains, she has a great passion for folk music, and fond memories of the Vosges and the epinette .  During the instruments revival in the 1960s,  Michel Hindenoch (a friend of the family) had played the epinette at her home in Nancy.

15 years ago she helped me by translating some information on the instruments background from the french text available (before the days of services like altavista Translations and the internet!)  I wrote a short essay and made a simple open-backed  epinette at this time.

In 1999 I released the article online on my first website.www.michaeljking.supanet.com, its still up there, but you can also download the article here as a PDF document  Included in the article are measurements and a minimal plan to guide you in making your own.  In addition to the info and links on the pdf there are now many more épinette sites on the Internet, Here is a wonderful website that has sound samples and more info on making