Felix Habel is an eclectic violinmaker who was born and raised in Germany. He started his musical education before entering elementary school and began studying the violin at the age of 7. Very soon he received some basic instruction in woodworking from his father, a pragmatic mechanical engineer by trade and a skilled cabinet maker in his spare time. His mother, on the other hand, represented an artistic influence in his early life. She ran a handicraft supply shop at the time, and he began making some arts and crafts objects from olive wood to sell at the shop. Violinmaking seemed to be the perfect intersection of the two qualities he inherited from his parents: a 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. Except 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 for electric violins, cellos, and double basses. Since 2005, he has run his own violin shop in Pescara, Italy, which serves the local string player community. In 2021, he published an article in The Strad magazine ("The Height of Perfection", April 2021) and was awarded a bronze medal at the ANLAI competition in Pisogne, Italy.
Since his school days in Cremona, Habel has been 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 have developed his personal way of building that guarantees a high acoustical standard and consistency of his production.
