I´m Tino Mixan. I´m buildung bows for nyckelharpa – and here’s my story about it 😉
I got my first nyckelharpa around 2001, and in the beginning I played a lot. But I was already an active multi-instrumentalist (mostly strings and woodwinds) at that time, so, at some point, I had to put more focus on my main instruments for band projects. The Nyckelharpa felt in a long sleep, but while I’m playing also fiddle, Swedish music and therefore the nyckelharpa were always present.
In the year 2014 something strange happened: By accident I won an auction in Vienna (Austria). An old Nyckelharpa built in 1943, with its original bow, the original case and some old photographs inside. It turned out that this instrument was built by August Bohlin (the inventor of the modern chromatic nyckelharpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Bohlin ) and it was also HIS personal instrument (compare the two pictures!). Here comes an unanswered question: how did this very specific instrument came to Vienna to an instrument auction? I got two small hints later, but in fact we might never really know it :-/ But it came into the right hands. 😉
There wasn’t so much to do to get this instrument into a playable state 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 playing and practising I recognized that I couldnt go technical go further on in cause of the right bow. The old-style nyckelharpa bow didnt work that much for me and also the baroque-style bows (which were invented after the nyckelharpa entered the old-music-scene) weren´t what I was looking for. The solution had to be something in-between. So, I had to go on by myself. Luckily I had learned working with wood in the past. With the support of Lena Galle-Hamelbeck (bowmaker in Vienna) and Nupi Jenner (Luthier, also in Vienna) I had the possibilty to develop my own models for nyckelharpa bows.
After a while and after building some prototypes, I had the chance to meet various nyckelharpa players for getting lots of nice feedback. At this point I would like to 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’v built a lot of bows and am developing them constantly……