Biography

Felix Habel is an eclectic violinmaker who was born and raised in Germany. He started his musical education before entering elementary school and started studying the violin at the age of 7. Very soon he got some basic instructions in woodworking by his father, a pragmatic mechanical engineer by trade and a skilled cabinet maker in his spare time. His mother, on the other hand, represented the artistic influence in his early life. She ran a handicraft supply shop at the time and he started making some arts and crafts objects from olive wood to sell at the shop. Violinmaking seemed to be the perfect conjunction of the two qualities he enherited from his parents: the technical approach from his father and creativity from his mother, combined with music! In 1992 he enrolled in the Violin Making School of Cremona where he studied with Giorgio C’è and Massimo Negroni. Exept for a brief experience at Carlsson, Cacciatori, Neuman’s workshop he mainly worked on his own. In the early years after graduating, he also cultivated his interest in electric string instruments developing his own designs of electric violin, cello and double bass. Since 2005 he’s running his violin shop in Pescara/Italy serving the local string player community. In 2021 he published an article in the Strad magazine (“The Height of Perfection”, April 2021) and was awarded with a bronze medal at the ANLAI competition in Pisogne/Italy.

Since his school days in Cremona he was interested in acoustic research and methods to control sound during construction. This scientific approach and his ambition to continously improve the performance of his instruments brought him to develop his personal way of building that guarantees a high acoustical standard and consistency of his production.