about me

I’m Tino Mixan from Vienna / Austria. I´m building bows for nyckelharpa and here is my story about it 😉

I got my first Nyckelharpa around 2001, and in the beginning I played a lot. Already working as an active multi-instrumentalist (mostly strings and woodwinds), I still had at that point more focus on my main instruments in my main band projects. So the Nyckelharpa fell in a long sleep, but as I also played fiddle, Swedish music (and by this way the nyckelharpa) always held a presence in my life.

In the year 2014, something strange happened: By accident, I won an auction here in Vienna: An old Nyckelharpa built in 1943, together with the original bow and the original case with some old photographs inside. It turned out that this instrument was built by August Bohlin (the inventor of the modern chromatic nyckelharpa )and it was also HIS personal instrument. ( Compare the two pictures)

Here comes an unanswered question – how did this very specific instrument come to an instrument auction in Vienna? I later got two small hints, but we never really know it :-/ Anyway it came into the right hands. 😉

There was not too much to do to make this instrument playable again. In the workshop of the luthier Nupi Jenner, we replaced the strings, reconstructed the bridge and got the pegs working – and voilá !!! So I started playing nyckelharpa again. But after a while of playing and practising I realized that I couldn’t make much technical progress, missing the right bow: The old-style nyckelharpa bow didn’t really work for me and also the baroque-style bows (which were invented after the nyckelharpa had entered the early music-scene) were not what I was looking for. The solution had to be somewhere in the middle. So, I had to go on with it by myself (luckily I had a solid knowledge of woodworking from the past).

With the support of Lena Galle-Hamelbeck (bow maker in Vienna) and Nupi Jenner (Luthier, also in Vienna) I had the possibility to develop my own models for nyckelharpa bows. After a while, building some prototypes, I had chance to meet various nyckelharpa players for getting lots of nice feedback. At this point I would thank Josefina Paulson ( www.josefinapaulson.se ) — she was the person who forced me the most to go further on with bow making for nyckelharpas. Since then I built a lot of bows and am developing them constantly……