Founded 1973 · Palm Bay, Florida

A Family of Handcrafted Folk Instruments

Roosebeck is a family story told in wood, string, and hard work.

For more than fifty years, our family has been building handcrafted folk instruments for players who care about how an instrument sounds, how it feels, and how it was made. Mountain dulcimers. Celtic harps. Renaissance lutes. Bodhrans. Balalaikas, ukuleles, and so much more. Every Roosebeck instrument is shaped by hand from solid tonewoods using methods that have been passed from one generation of craftspeople to the next.

This is not a factory brand. It never has been.

It Started in a Living Room

In 1973, our family began making small hand percussion instruments at a kitchen table in Ohio. One pair at a time. One customer at a time. What started as a labor of love for a single family of musicians grew, slowly and honestly, into something bigger.

By the 1980s, the workshop had outgrown the house. The family moved the business to Florida and opened a small storefront, where musicians came in to try instruments they had only ever read about. Demand kept climbing. In 1991, a dedicated warehouse went up to keep pace with the orders coming in from teachers, performers, and curious beginners who had fallen in love with the sound of a dulcimer or the shape of a Celtic harp.

Through all of it, one thing never changed: every instrument was built by hand, by people who cared about the instruments they made.

From a Family Workshop to the Roosebeck Collection

Roosebeck launched in 2010 as the family's flagship line of fine acoustic instruments. It was a chance to gather everything the family had learned, across decades of building, into a single collection that represented the best of what our workshop could do.

Today the Roosebeck collection spans dozens of world music traditions, from Appalachian mountain dulcimers and Celtic harps to Renaissance lutes and Russian balalaikas. Every piece is built to a standard that working musicians can rely on night after night, lesson after lesson, generation after generation.

The headquarters sits in Palm Bay, Florida, near the Indian River. That's where our team designs, curates, and personally supports every instrument that carries the Roosebeck name.

How Our Instruments Are Made

Every Roosebeck instrument is handcrafted in a multi-generational, family-run workshop we've partnered with since the 1980s, a partnership built on decades of shared standards and mutual respect. Skilled artisans select and shape solid rosewood, walnut, spruce, lacewood, and other carefully chosen tonewoods using traditional woodworking techniques.

Old Craft, Modern Precision

We believe the best instruments come from knowing when to trust a machine and when to trust a hand. Our workshop uses CNC routers and laser cutters for the work that rewards exact repeatability: intricate rosette patterns, clean fret slots, consistent bracing cuts, and ornamental inlays that need to match perfectly from one instrument to the next. Modern tools do this kind of work more cleanly than any hand ever could.

But everything that gives an instrument its character still happens the old way.

• Harp frames are carved and shaped by hand, one at a time.
• Lute bowls are built stave by stave, the traditional way.
• Bodhran shells are formed from a single strip of solid timber, steam-bent into a perfect circle and hand-glued to hold its shape.
• Dulcimer soundboards are hand-fitted so the wood can breathe and sing.
• Tone and finish are shaped, sanded, and voiced by the people who built the instrument.

The result is an instrument with character you can see in the grain and hear in every note. Warm. Resonant. Precise where precision matters. Unmistakably made by human hands where it counts.

What We Believe

Music should belong to everyone.

Whether you're picking up a mountain dulcimer for the very first time or adding a Renaissance lute to your touring rig, you deserve an instrument that's honestly built, sounds beautiful, and respects the tradition it comes from. That belief is what got our family into this work in 1973, and it's what keeps us here.

Some things are worth doing the slow way.

Frequently Asked Questions