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   What a tender hell it is to create and to build a musical instrument starting from a small idea, a musical desire that leads to the drawing table, the saw-mill then to the workshop (I'm passing the details right now) and ending up having the ultimate honour to play it.

   The birth of an instrument is the fruit of a long journey where musical aesthetics, visual aesthetics, technical thought, and the manual know-how meet.

   Above all for me, the driving force to create a clavichord model lies in the desire to see the instrument exist comprised of certain precise characteristics.

   These characteristics may be of a practical order (weight, dimension, price, ...), musical (historical copies, a link with a composer, representation of a period, ...) aesthetic, but most often it's a matter of finding equilibrium between certain priorities.
   Experience and passion, permits me to keep in memory almost all the instruments that I encountered, the sensation of the playing they offer, their sound properties, as well as the manner in which they are built. I must say that they all taught me something, even the worst ones !

   Historical instruments are a particularly important source of knowledge. With a good number of examples, the links between the sound properties and the physical characteristics are established by deduction. Of course, it is also possible to establish other links by direct experimentation by isolating the parameters.

   Suffering of an incurable fondness for keyboard instruments, my performer career has always evolved together with my instrument builder-restaurer career.

   Thus I ascended in time, being a pianist, a tuner, a piano restorer, a fortepianist and a fortepiano restorer and finally a clavichord builder and clavichordist.

   Like composers who must study the masters of the past, it is the same for instrument building. It is essential to know very well instrument making of the past to add a useful contribution.

   I believe that the clavichord has a brilliant future and that it may respond to certain present musical needs by the finesse of the touch that it requires and by the subtlety of the sound as well as practical matters; it may succeed to get us out of our noisy world.