FARMINGTON – At 3 one morning this summer, Robert Beacham sat bolt upright in bed, ran down to his workshop and started to furiously take apart two violins.

He turned on the heater and a dehumidifier and hunkered down. He worked past dawn. And by the time the rest of the world was getting going, he was holding two masterpieces in his hands. Two violins that made music sweeter and richer than anything he had created before.

“I can only describe the sound as having a new kind of freedom,” Beacham said Monday, seated in the same workshop and surrounded by violins and an almost-completed cello.

He’s come a long way in the 27 years he’s been teaching himself the craft, Beacham said. He was in music school in Cleveland with his wife and brother when he realized he hated performing. His wife suggested violin-making.

“And just like that, I went bonkers,” he said. “I started buying wood and filled my apartment with wood shavings.” Then his wife, Nancy, introduced him to a violin maker in her hometown of Amherst, Mass. Marten Cornellisen was just what Beacham needed, he said Monday. “He showed me some stuff, and then said ‘don’t come back until you’ve made something.'”

“So I got together a violin. It took me about six months,” Beacham said.

His first attempt was terrible, he said, but little by little, he learned what he was doing. As a violinist, he said he wanted to make instruments violinists would enjoy playing. With that in mind, he taught himself, copying the masters like Stradivari and Guarnieri but adding his own personal touch to everything he made.

He’s still learning from experience, he said. After a few years feeling like he’d hit a plateau in his craft, he began talking with high-end violin dealers who sell instruments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A few weeks ago, one of them told him taking some weight off his violins would make the sound richer. He wondered how.

That brings us to his 3 a.m. wake-up and the mad dash that followed.

It’s the type of inspiration-fueled effort that people tend to associate with artistic types, but Beacham contends he’s not an artist. Back in the days of Stradivarius, violin making was an art. Now, with violin makers and dealers just trying to get back to that pinnacle of perfect sound, violin making is about craftsmanship, not personal expression. “These days, it’s not art anymore.”

Portland Symphony violinist Clorinda Noyes might disagree.

In a culture that favors old masters over fresh upstarts, she had been playing a 19th century instrument made by a world-renowned American violin maker whose pieces regularly sell for more than $20,000. She was never fully happy with it, she said.

She and her husband visited Beacham’s workshop one day to have her violin serviced when she saw one of his hanging on the wall. “It was sparkly,” she said.

A few weeks later she borrowed it for a month – kind of a test drive, concert violinist style. Her husband told her he’d like to buy it for her if she fell in love with it. “And I did fall in love with it,” she said. “And I feel like it’s changed my life.”

On Sunday, she went back to Beacham’s workshop. He had taken the instrument back to give it his newly discovered upgrade.

Noyes said playing it again Sunday night was pure joy. “It’s as if for the first time, I’ve found my voice in a violin,” she said.

“It just feels like … the sound is coming through me and coming out, instead of getting stuck,” she said. “I didn’t know if that was possible to find a violin that sounded out there the way you hear the music inside,” she said. “The emotion is joy.”