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New article name goes here Keith Hill (Keith Hill (8 May 1948) ].

Keith Hill (born 8 May 1948) is an American maker of musical instruments who has pioneered research into the acoustical technology employed by the most important musical instrument makers from 1550 – 1850.

Life and career
Born in China to missionary parents, and raised in the Philippines, Hill moved to the United States in permanently in1962. He attended music school at Michigan State University, studying piano and carillon with Wendell Westcott, organ with Corliss Arnold, and piano tuning and historical temperaments with Owen Jorgensen. He graduated with a BM in music history from Western Michigan University in 1971.

Hill became interested in making harpsichords while a student at Michigan State and built his first instrument there. He worked briefly making harpsichords for Rainer Schutze in Heidelberg, Germany and then for E.O. Witt in Three Rivers, Michigan before studying harpsichord performance with Anneke Uittenbosch at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He interrupted his studies to travel around Europe making measurements of more than 150 antique harpsichords, fortepianos, clavichords, and virginals.

His career as a harpsichord maker began in 1972 when he opened a workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Working alone, he made on average 12 double manual harpsichords a year, and it was during these early years that he began his serious research into the acoustical technology of the best musical instrument makers from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods in music.

In 1980 Hill invented a design for a pedal harpsichord that has since been copied by other harpsichord makers as it has become the standard design for pedal harpsichords due to the improved sound and ease of use the design features. Makers such as Hubbard Harpsichords, Inc., Thomas Pixton, and others have made pedal instruments using Hill’s design.

His researches into violin making began with the study of a Golden Period Stradivari violin in which he made an original observation of the acoustical principle apparent to him on this instrument, and on which he published a paper in the Guild of American Luthiers Journal Data sheet #283 in 1984 titled "Area Tuning the Violin." This article described Hill's view that the violin makers in Italy during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries had tuned the various areas of the violin plates to musical ratios—Pythagorean musical ratios being the scientific paradigm of that time.

In this same year, he also wrote two articles for publication in Continuo, an early music magazine at the time. One titled "The Anatomy of Authenticity" criticized the attitude that then pervaded the early music instrument making community which was dismissive of any approach to making early instruments that was not an exact copy of an original instrument. In noter article,  "How to Judge a Harpsichord," Hill describes the objective properties and traits that one should look for in all good musical instruments, especially harpsichords.

Two years later, he was the featured Artist in an article published in the Continuo magazine. Over the next seven years he wrote articles on technical subjects. In "Plastic versus Quill" he relates his experiences with voicing and regulating both Delrin plastic plectra and real bird feather quills for the plectra in harpsichords and urges others to use real quill in their instruments because the sound was so superior to the sound made by plastic plectra. He also authored a column in the Continuo, which discussed the importance of and techniques for improvising music.

It was at this time that his research into violin acoustics required serious investigation into the question of violin varnishes. He determined to avoid the usual approaches for making violin varnish and established a comprehensive list of all the criteria and standards—acoustical, physical, optical, and chemical—as taken from the entire literature existing on the subject of violin varnish since the 16th century. This approach meant evaluating each batch of varnish based on all these criteria. After 5 years of intensive experimentation, he developed a varnish made from wood ashes, water (to convert the ash to lye), linseed oil, and rosin, which met every single criterion and standard set in advance for the research. In 1994 he publish his findings in an article in the Guild of American Luthiers Journal #37 titled: Ash Violin Varnish, in which he described in detail how to make the varnish. Further research in 2012-13 led Hill to refine his ultimate varnish recipe.

The articles enumerated above were followed by his Treatise on the True Art of Making Musical Instruments—a Practical Guide to the Forgotten Craft of Enhancing Sound, a 400 page book encompassing the 13 Acoustical Principles, of which he discovered 9 and which others had discovered before or during the period of his research into sound. This work has yet to be published, but it is used as his text for his Acoustical Technology Training program, established in 2007. A number of apprentices have participated in this training program.

In 1998 Hill began five years of research into the tanning methods and techniques for the making of hammer leather suitable for making fortepianos, at the end of which he developed a hammer leather that fulfilled every criterion and standard established at the beginning of that research.

During his entire career he has actively engaged in an investigation of the performance practice methods and techniques of musicians from the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. His research partners were his wife, Marianne Ploger, since 2007 Professor of Music Perception and Cognition at Vanderbilt University, and his brother, Robert Hill, Director of the Early Music Program at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, in Germany. He later co-authored a rewrite of this article and another article titled: On Affect, with his wife, Marianne Ploger and presented with her a series of workshops on the craft of musical communication at conservatories and schools of music in Europe and the US.

In 2004 he performed an acoustical restoration of the 1658 de Zentis harpsichord, originally part of the collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. That instrument is now in Italy.

Instruments (as of March 2014)
Hill's production of musical instruments is prodigious, and includes:

157	Double Manual Harpsichords (6 were 16’ harpsichords) 124	Violins 68	Single Manual Harpsichords 44	Clavichords 39	Violas da Gamba 22	Spinets 19 	Fortepianos 11	Pedal Harpsichords 8	Guitars 8	Violas 7	Cellos 4	Double Basses 4	Violones 4 	Lautenwerk 3	Gothic Harps 3	Rebecs 2	Violas d’Amour 1	3 Manual Harpsichord 1	Virginal 1	Three rank wooden organ 1	Pedal Clavichord 1	Clavicytherium 1	Cembalo Universale with 19 notes per octave 1 	Psaltry 1	Fiedle (Vihuela) 1	Folding travel harpsichord

Writings
"The Craft of Musical Communication" in the Japanese Clavichord Society Journal in 1996

"Hints to Area Tuning the Violin" in the Guild of American Luthiers Journal (Vol. 1 #1)