When I was fifteen years old I had the opportunity to borrow a damaged clarinet from my school orchestra. I took the instrument home and tinkered with it until it was in working order again. I was actually supposed to learn to play on it, but after I had repaired it, the instrument was good enough for a better player than myself. As a result, my short career as a clarinetist had ended, while my career as an instrument maker had begun. Since then I have focused exclusively on building recorders. A few years later I began recorder studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music, from where I graduated in 1980. 1980-81 I was a visiting student at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where, in addition to recorder playing, I studied recorder making with Ricardo Kanji and Peter van der Poel.