Governments around the world are calling for a revival of apprenticeship on a large scale, emphasizing the value of the one-on-one, human interaction between master and apprentice and the teaching involved in that interaction. Although a broader historical view of apprenticeship shares these ideas, certain prominent threads within recent educational research have done a great deal to deemphasize them. Some go so far as to overlook the master-apprentice relationship altogether, assert that masters simply do not exist, and claim that apprenticeship learning happens without any teaching at all. In response to these claims, the researcher took part in an autoethnographic case study, participating himself in a two-year apprenticeship under a master violinmaker. Analysis from the case suggests that the one-on-one master-apprentice relationship plays a key role in apprenticeship learning, that mastery is embodied in individuals rather than in communities alone, and that a master's teaching does in fact make a difference to an apprentice's learning.