Making musical instruments the old-fashioned way.

Four hundred years ago, artisans crafted violins by hand from the best spruce and maple. It took them months to carve the wood and glue each piece together without using screws or nails.

Today, as BMWs roar by and exercise nuts work out at Nautilus across the street, Hans Benning and his son Brian sit inside their Studio City Music workshop and make violins exactly the same way.

"The day a computer comes in here is the day I leave," Hans Benning quips. "You couldn't pay me enough to work with a computer."

Benning is not alone. A handful of craftsmen in L.A. County makes musical instruments by hand, cutting, bending and gluing until their masterpieces sing.

The artisans certainly get more money for their finished products than they would have 400 years ago. Benning's handmade violins start at $3,500, and some cellos sell for as much as $15,000 apiece.

Meanwhile, over in Hollywood, Calicchio Trumpets sells handmade horns for about $2,000 apiece. Even more expensive, the jazz guitars Arturo Valdez makes in his Hollywood shop sell for $10,000 apiece.

Most such artisans can't make a living off selling their own instruments alone. They also repair, restore and sell instruments they didn't make.

Some are very picky about the parts they use to make their musical works of art. "The best wood for the violin comes from Bosnia," Benning says. "We won't see much wood coming out of there for a long time."

But Benning doesn't have to worry. He says he has enough wood in storage to last through his son's lifetime, "and maybe enough for his kids."

The wood used to make violins has to have been cut at least 25 years ago so it is dry and "doesn't shrink on you after the violin is made," he explains.

"The wood is half your instrument," Benning says. "If you have good wood, you can make a good instrument. If you have poor wood, no matter what your skill is, you'll never make anything out of it."

Hanging against a wall of Benning's shop is a large, black horsetail Benning says he uses for cello bows. "The best horse hair comes from Mongolia," he remarks.

But other artisans have their own preferences. Valdez, who makes flamenco, classical and jazz guitars, says he tries to use only American ingredients. One exception is the ebony he uses for fingerboards, which comes from Madagascar, he says.

Instrument-making is not a fast-paced, 1990s-style career. "If you work eight hours a day, six days a week, it takes about eight weeks to make a violin" and about six months to make a cello, Benning says.

Brian Benning, 23, is making his fourth violin ever. On one scorching June day, he sits on a chair in his workshop sculpting the violin's top with a tool that resembles a carrot peeler. It takes a couple of days to sculpt the top of the violin just right.

The violin's bottom and neck are sculpted in the same way and then, with a few more carved details added, the pieces are glued together. Applying varnish is one of the last steps. One material the Bennings use for varnish is propolis, a natural substance bees employ to plaster their hives.

Hans Benning says he also uses lavender oil and Venetian turpentine, which looks like thick honey, adding that he gets many varnish materials from a drugstore in Germany.

Benning may make violins the old-fashioned way, but at least he makes a modern instrument. Robb Stewart in Arcadia creates instruments that most people haven't heard or played in over a hundred years -- copper, brass and silver replicas of 19th century instruments.

All the Civil War-era instruments "are hot these days," he says, noting there are 15 to 20 bands around the country that play music from the Civil War era.

Stewart sells his instruments to some of these bands, as well as to "individuals fascinated with the idea of having a replica," he says.

"I figure I'll make the things nobody else wants to make," Stewart adds.

He makes cornets, alto horns, tenor horns, baritone horns, base horns, keyed bugles and, of course, ophicleides. An ophicleide is a bassoon-shaped brass instrument with a bell pointing skyward and a mouthpiece that protrudes from the side.

Stewart says he has a "challenging" request to make a sterling silver ophicleide and isn't sure how he is going to do it.

For the other ophicleides he has made, Stewart has bought mass-produced brass bells. (Stewart cheats a little by using some machine-made parts for his instruments.) But no one makes sterling ophicleide bells, and Stewart says he doesn't have the capacity to make one.

Also the "crook," the curved tubing at the bottom of the instrument, "is hard to make in brass and will be harder in silver," he says, adding that he plans to charge more than $4,000 to the buyer of this instrument once it's finished.

Stewart, who works by himself, has made two 5-foot-4-inch-tall contrabass ophicleides in the past. A contrabass plays an octave lower than a normal bass instrument and is usually much larger. These are the two largest ophicleides in existence, he says.

Stewart says he makes 12 to 14 instruments a year, while Calicchio makes from 150 to 200. Calicchio sells horns to customers all over the world, including to horn players in South America, Japan and Europe, says owner Irma Calicchio, whose father started the business more than 60 years ago.

A horn has about 200 parts, and Calicchio makes all of them from scratch except for the springs and corks. Calicchio starts with only metal sheets or tubing.

To make the casing for the trumpet valves, for example, employee David Poplawski takes a brass tube, cuts it, makes slots in it with a machine called a "miller," drills holes in it and assembles three such tubes together by attaching them with brass "crooks", or curved tubes.

The pistons are made out of a metal called monel in a similar way. Poplawski puts slots and holes in it, fits crooks into the holes and fits the pistons inside the valves.

"We have only four people that put their hands on the horn. So we produce better-quality instruments, whereas others produce better-priced instruments," says Christopher Calicchio Weik, Irma's son and the third generation in the business.

To make a trumpet bell, one of these four people hammers a flat sheet of brass onto a rod until it becomes bell-shaped. Then it is put on a mandrel, a machine with a bar-shaped rod that turns, and it is spun and hammered to take a more refined form.

This particular company thrives by selling its own handmade instruments, and nothing else, with about $250,000 in sales each year, Irma Calicchio says.