mackerelmint wrote: ↑Tue Sep 22, 2020 9:04 pm
Oh yeah. Clearly I paid close attention.
Well, happy new lute day.
Thanks!
This is a 13-course (24-string) Baroque lute.
The Medieval lute started out with 5 courses, then started slowly growing and accumulating courses throughout the Renaissance, steadily going from 6 in the early Renaissance to 10 by its end (all added on to the bass side).
The French kicked off the Baroque variant by expanding it to 11, and changing the tuning scheme completely from fourths and one third (not unlike a guitar) to a D minor chord (f-d-a-f-d-a for the first six courses, then a descending diatonic scale).
In Germany, they then took the French Baroque lute and added a couple more bass courses, giving you the instrument we've got here - 13 courses in D minor with a descending scale down all the way to A1 from there. The lowest courses needed a longer scale length, so they added a "bass rider", which is a protrustion from the headstock that gives courses 12 and 13 an extra 8cm in this case:
The German variant can play both the German and French repertoires, with German composers being the best-reputed. Silvius Leopold Weiss being the apex. Bach was of course German as well, but the nature of his lute suites are hotly debated. Some scholars maintain that all of them were written for the lautenwerck, which was a gut-strung, bowl-shaped lute-harpsichord, of which Bach owned two, while others think they were written for the lute. The puzzle is that a few of them are virtually impossible to actually play on the contemporary German instrument of the time, but that's a whole other post!
Point is, I decided that, since Baroque lute music was my favourite repertoire to play on classical guitar, I wanted to finally learn to play it on the original instrument itself. I've been reconnecting with my classical guitar roots and the upcoming "winter of our discontent" seemed like a good opportunity to do so.
This particular lute was built by a Turkish luthier family by the name of Sandi (Saadetin and Bahadir being the father-son team). Very few people build lutes, and Baroque lutes in particular tend to run in the $6k-$10k USD price range, which is not a reasonable gamble on an instrument that I don't actually know how to play. The Sandis build a serviceable instrument for the price of a MIM offset, so I took the plunge.
It sounds great, but needs a little bit of setup work, as well as an endpin - Baroque lutes are downright impossible to hold without a "lute strap" that connects to the pegbox and endpin and is then tucked under you and you sit, so that it doesn't require propping up or stabilization in playing position.
I'm taking it to my local folk instrument repair guy tomorrow to have the endpin added, and have some strings in the mail - it came with a slightly weird choice of very thin wound 4th course strings that both snapped within an hour of being tuned to pitch, when a thicker plain string does the job well and is much stronger. The strings are from La Bella and are nice quality rectified nylon with silverwound basses, so I'm not changing them just yet (a set of strings can run from $75 to $200+ USD depending on materials).
It'll be a couple of weeks before I have it ready to rock, but I'm really looking forward to this.