Andrew Instruments may be county's best-kept secret

Photo By Kristen Luther Dewey Cornett, owner of Andrew Instruments, sands and levels a mountain dulcimer.

By Julie Fann
STAR STAFF
jfann@starhq.com

   Inside a small garage that sits beside their family home in Valley Forge, the Cornetts work 15 hours a day amid piles of sawdust building quality musical instruments that have gained national and international recognition.
   "We just don't have a sign. We kind of like being hidden. A guy came in here two or three days ago, and he said, 'I've been through here a million times, and I would have never known you were here'," said Dewey Cornett, who followed his passion and started Andrew Instruments 10 years ago with his wife and two friends.
   The company - if you can call it that without the negative connotation - has made and sold enough instruments to at least double the size of the business in the past five years. Customers from as far away as France, England, and Germany have purchased Andrew instruments, which bear Cornett's only son's middle name. The company also sells to well-known music dealers like Ghrun and Chambers in Nashville, as well as stores in New Mexico and Michigan.
   Cornett and his crew build mountain dulcimers, acoustic guitars, dobro guitars and mandolins from a variety of woods. Instruments are decorated using inlaid mother of pearl, green abalone, and Ebony wood.
   "Often I don't know where the instruments I make go or who is actually buying them, and it's just the thought that somebody is somewhere playing music on these things. That, to me, is pretty neat," Cornett said.
   Cornett began playing the guitar at age 11 and built his first one when he was just 13 years old. "I always enjoyed working with wood. Between that and playing music and just being around it because of my grandfather and my uncles, when I had a chance to put the two of them together, I thought this would be cool," he said.
   Wood to build the instruments comes from places as far north as Canada and includes birch, mahogany, figured walnuts, curly maples, rosewood and spruce.
   "We like to use some of our own walnut here for the dulcimers because that kind of instrument is like a folk piece. I try to keep that as local as I can. The only part that doesn't come from here on the dulcimers is the spruce top."
   The difference between a hand-built musical instrument and an assembly line piece are sound and tone. The player can actually feel the back of a hand-built instrument vibrating when they play it. Sound is also dependent on the type of wood used to build the instrument.
   "With today's wood there is a lot of space between growth rings. The tighter the growth rings the better the tone is. If it was real wide, like pines, it may produce a good tone but not like wood with a tighter growth ring," Cornett said.
   Cornett is currently building an instrument from a 600 to 700-year-old piece of birch that was pulled from a lake and sent to him by the customer.
   "Years ago, a log would come down the river and sink to the bottom, and they started pulling this stuff up. You just can't find wood like this anymore. They're cutting wood down as fast as they can. We can't count the growth rings in this piece because they're so tight.
   "You can see a million beautiful instruments, but when you play them and you pick up one that's a really nice guitar, you can tell it's a different sound, a different tone, a different way it feels."
   All Andrew instruments have a one-year warranty. Cornett said what he likes most about building them is that, just like people, each one is unique.
   "There's not one of them in here that will sound the same as the other ones. It's sort of like people in a way. They're all different."
   For more information about Andrew Instruments, visit their Web site at www.andrewinstrument.com.