RN: Today we visit John and his wife Sally in Bozeman. John is another friend of mine from those special grad school days at UCSD.  He originally went to UCSD because he was drafted for the Vietnam War but declared himself a conscientious objector and actually got his draft board in San Jose to assign him to the Selverston lab to do electrophysiology because Selverston had federal grants (brilliant). He eventually got his PhD, did a postdoc and got recruited to Montana State University to be the Director of the Center of Computational Biology.  After he retired in 2015, he immersed himself in the art and science of building musical string instruments, entirely self-taught. He has built gorgeous banjoes, guitars, mandolins, and created some new string instruments as well. Sally is a musician, educator, and former principal of a public school. She met John because she wrote music to teach students about the brain and needed a neuroscientist to check the lyrics for accuracy. Interesting!

Here are John and I standing on the deck of his gorgeous home…

John thoroughly researched the physics underlying musical string instrument and therefore identified special, acoustically favorable woods and unique ways to anchor the strings to enhance the sounds produced. Here is one of the banjoes he made. Note the beautiful wood work. He uses exotic woods whose names I have completely forgotten, but this wood is naturally very smooth (look at the inside of the back) so he used a tool to carve out the texture on the sides of the banjo and polished the wood.

Below is the neck of the banjo above. Beautiful inlay! All self-taught! And the banjo has a beautiful sound…

He also created an infinity mirror banjo that is shown below. It displays the mirror when you strum the strings and its design optimizes the sound of the music. The text hidden behind his hand says, “Cogito ergo strum”. For you music aficionados who want to know more about this banjo, check out the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekF6sBoHvr0

He also figured out a way to embed ammonites in the neck of this banjo.

There’s even more stuff I could write about John’s instruments and how he improved sound on guitars and mandolins by getting rid of the hole in front and replaced it with a hole to the side with a special acoustic impedance matcher inside the body, but enough!! Let’s show you photos we took when John and Sally drove us out to the secret location of the Ted Turner Ranch…

John and Sally…

The lone bison we saw when, at other times (we hear), there can be hundreds or even thousands…

Falling in love with Montana…

FE: John is the only one of Rae’s grad-student friends I have yet to meet, and I feel instantly at ease with him and Sally. I learn a few more stories of the good old days, and I am a bit jealous because in my own grad experience there was no such tight-knit group and everybody went their own way. John, Sally and I also discover that we share a love of books and indeed have read some of the same works. How fun! And Ted Turner knew beauty when he saw it!