Fifty Years of Lutherie: Red Wing's amazing legacy of teaching string instrument repair and making at Minnesota State College Southeast

By Katryn Conlin for Minnesota Bluegrass Magazine, May 2025

What do Curtis Teague, Gary Bartig, Kari Larson, Ted Vig, and Jed Germond have in common? How about Ron Tracy and Michelle Beardsley of Saint Paul Guitar Repair or Charlotte Matis of Blackbird Music? They are all among the many local graduates of the string instrument repair programs at Minnesota State College Southeast. 

Launched in 1974, Southeast's Guitar Repair and Building and Violin Repair and Making programs in Red Wing, MN are jointly celebrating 50 years of teaching lutherie this year.

Over the years hundreds of students have come from all 50 states in the U.S. and countless foreign countries -- including Canada, the United Kingdom, Oman, Botswana, Thailand, Korea, Australia, and Switzerland, to name just a few -- to learn the art of lutherie at Southeast.

Incorporating both violin and guitar repair, String Instrument Repair was first taught by Larry Frye from 1974-1980, followed by Dave Patterson from 1980-1984. 

In 1984, David Vincent moved to Red Wing from Wichita, KS, to teach at the college. Under Vincent's guidance the program grew to such an extent that an instructor specializing in violin was hired in 1990, Lisbeth Nelson Butler.

Both instructors contributed decades of expertise and dedication to their programs. David Vincent focused on Guitar Repair and Building until his retirement in 2021. Lisbeth Nelson Butler established a world-renowned Violin Repair program and retired in 2017.

Today's instructors are all past students of Nelson Butler and Vincent: Southeast graduates Steve Rossow and Charlotte Matis (violin) and Brian Boedigheimer, Tim Reede, and Ben Williams (guitar).

At the Student Guitar Show and Student Violin Showcase on May 15 and 16, visitors can see first-hand the impressive work being done by Minnesota State College Southeast's next generation of string instrument makers, a testament to the college's legacy of 50 Years of Lutherie. Campus tours will be available - a chance to see how the lutherie labs have grown and changed over the years. 

Minnesota Bluegrass caught up with David Vincent for this interview. Having taught Guitar Repair and Building for 37 years, he has a lot of memories to share from his time as an instructor in Red Wing. 

Before you came to the college in 1984, what were you doing and how were you educated?

I was working at Wichita Violin Shop and E.M. Shorts Guitars, which were part of a parent company called Wichita Band Instrument Company. I did repair work for both of them from 1978 until I came here in 1984. Before that, I went to Roberto Venn School of Luthierie in 1975 and studied music at Wichita State University. 

When you came to Southeast, you were teaching both violin and guitar repair at the same time. What was your first year of teaching like?

When I started in the fall of 1984, there hadn't been an instructor for several weeks! Dave Patterson had left the first day of school because of disagreements with the administration. He had been told he could go part time because he wanted to put more time into his shop at home. But when the school year started, the principal, who was brand new, said "You either teach full time or you don't teach at all." It took them about five or six weeks to find me. They contacted wholesale supply houses and shops looking for somebody who had experience in both violin and guitar.  

Dave Patterson actually came back to the school and offered me a lot of help. He substituted for me and gave me a lot of information on how to teach guitar building, since I hadn't built an acoustic guitar since I went to Roberto Venn.

Did you teach the students how to build a guitar right from the beginning, as well as guitar and violin repair? 

Yes, at first students could build any flat top acoustic guitar they wanted to, or even a classical guitar. But our advisory committee said that letting everyone design their own guitar meant they had to make all the templates, molds, and jigs from scratch and that didn't represent the way the real world works. Almost all makers have models they produce, so they are already set up to make those models. 

When we changed it so students could choose to make a dreadnaught, an OM, or a parlour, it made a big improvement in the quality of the instruments. 

Why did the college separate the guitar and violin programs in 1990?  

When we were trying to do violin repair work and guitar repair work and build a guitar all in one year it was just too much. We went to our advisory committee and said, we need your support to make a change. And they said that what we were trying do didn't make any sense because most of the jobs are either guitar jobs or violin jobs. I didn't agree with that -- there are a lot of shops like Schmidt music stores and ma-and-pa shops that do both. But the advisory committee supported our separating the programs.

So you started off in Fall 1989 as one program, but then in January 1990, Lisbeth Nelson Butler was hired. Did she teach all the violin classes and you taught all the guitar classes?

The students actually changed their program to either violin specialty or guitar specialty right in the middle of the year at the beginning of January. They already knew which way they wanted to go. They were aware fairly early on in Fall semester that this was going to happen because we were petitioning the state to make the change. 

Was it a smooth transition?

I think so. The skills in both classes got a whole lot better when the students could concentrate on one thing or the other. Nobody had started building any guitars yet that year, because we had already changed it so that instead of starting to build guitars at the beginning of the year, we did repair classes in the fall and started guitar building in the Spring semester. 

For example, before we split, the only fret job the students did was on the guitar they built. Now they have a whole fret work class and they probably do four or five fret jobs before they do one on the guitar they build. Same with neck resets. The only neck set they used to do was on the guitar they built. Now they practice neck resets before they build. They practice a lot of the things that will make the guitars they build better instruments. 

What about on the Violin side? 

It was the same thing. They used to cut two or three violin bridges, and now I think they cut ten. The same with sound posts and bow rehairs - they might have done two or three and how they do eight or ten. They get so much more practice on every type of repair.

After the split, did you have much trouble recruiting enough students for a whole guitar program and a whole violin program? 

I don't remember us having much trouble. We had an active advisory committee by then, especially on the violin side. They were pretty excited that we were going to have a full-year violin repair program because while there were a few violin making schools -- Salt Lake City, Chicago and Boston -- none of them spent that much time on repair work. Right away we had international students and students from all over the country. 

What was your approach to teaching in the early days?

When I landed here, I had never taught before. There was no curriculum developed. It was all over the place. There were no power tool or hand tool classes, just one program. In those days, when you signed up for a program in a vo-tech, you did the program, not a set of classes. You were in the guitar repair program and that was it. You just went to school all day, every day. You got two grades -- one for Fall Semester, one for Spring. 

At a certain point, the state technical college system had us divide out what we taught into classes. We had to come up with class descriptions and content goals and develop a syllabus for each class. 

But before all that I just went home every day and asked myself, "What am I going to teach tomorrow?" and came back the next day!

When did you start getting other instructors? 

If Lisbeth and I found somebody available who could teach a particular class, we'd hire them just to keep our hours to regular full-time or not too much overload (overtime). 

For example, John Reed came on board as an adjunct and taught bow work classes starting in 1990. He then taught archtop building -- mandolins and violins -- for many years as half-time faculty until 2013. It was an optional class students could add on to their programs.

Roger Benedict was hired to teach the evening electric guitar construction class. He was a great luthier and built world-class electric guitars. He just loved the program, and he hired students from the college to work at his company, Benedict Guitars in Minneapolis. Curtis Teague went to work for Roger right away after graduating from here. I did an internship with Roger, and he served on our advisory committee. 

But it was very sad, because Roger was diagnosed with cancer and died in November 1994. He was only here a short time, but he was really pumped about teaching at the college. With the help of many friends and family, his wife Laurel set up the Roger Benedict Memorial Scholarship after he died. 

When did Brian Boedigheimer come on board to teach in the guitar program?

Lisbeth and I were both teaching overload quite a bit because both our programs were 38 or 40 credits long. Some of that was gen eds, but we were both teaching around 36 credits and 30 is full time. So we started thinking about adding more faculty.

Brian Boedigheimer graduated from guitar in 1994. In fact, Brian was one Roger Benedict's students. He had worked in a lot of music stores in the area and built electric guitars for Benedict Guitar Company. Brian also went to Dakota County Technical College's Wood Finishing program. He started teaching as an adjunct at the college in 2001.

After Brian had done some teaching, I said, "It's all yours this semester," and I took a sabbatical. At that point Brian became a full-time guitar program instructor. 

We kind of swapped places. I went to do repair work at Brickhouse Music in River Falls where he had been a repair person -- so I was getting some experience out in the "real world." And I used my sabbatical to write the manual that I used for building acoustic guitars

In 2010, you added a second year to the guitar program. Why?  

Our one-year program was going strong and we knew some students would come back for a second year to do more advanced projects. They can build archtop instruments and design and make whatever they want to. They do more complex inlay and Brian teaches more advanced finish work than we could do in one year.

We didn't hire an extra teacher or have a separate classroom for the second-year program right away. We used the first-year class's benches and the second-year students came in later in the day. 

Steve Rossow was hired to add CAD drafting and CNC to the second-year program in 2010. I remember Steve's job interview. He was showing us all the stuff he could do with CNC and drafting. I thought, "Oh, this is so cool! Can I take a class in it?" 

Steve also taught in the Violin program with Lisbeth, and when she retired in 2017, he became the lead Violin Repair and Making instructor. Brian Boedigheimer has since taken over teaching CAD and CNC. Meanwhile Tim Reede, a 2004 grad, began teaching at Southeast in 2015. Brian and Tim are full time faculty, and Ben Williams, another program grad, is an adjunct. 

What about the music scene at the college? 

In the first week of classes I used to get everyone to introduce themselves and invite them bring in their instruments and play in a couple of jam sessions. We would do an electric jam session in one room and an acoustic jam session in another. It depends on the year and who's enrolled, but there have been steady acoustic jams on campus most years.

Dave Patterson had been organizing a college variety showcase at the Sheldon Theatre in the early days before I was here. It was mostly guitar students at first. Now we have it every spring at the Sheldon and since it involves students from Guitar, Violin, and Band Instrument Repair, we call it "Strings, Winds & Brass."

Plus, we started having the Student Guitar Show on campus at the end of the year to showcase all the guitars and mandolins built by our students. I think we started that around 1990. In the last couple of years, Steve Rossow's students have added on a Violin Showcase as a separate event the day after the Student Guitar Show.

Do you miss the college now that you are retired?

Not exactly! Nowadays I'm back on campus in the second-year lab several days a week as an adult student. It's a great way to work on my mandolins and keep up with all my friends there.