Schreiner's Lute and Guitars -- Update

If you are wondering what has happened with the Checchucci guitar here is the latest view. I have made progress but it has been slowed by other commitments. I'll continue my reports on this instrument as I will soon have more time to concentrate on it.

The Koch theorbo (posts from Sept. 20 and April 19) was delivered earlier this month to the student baroque ensemble of Adlai Stevenson High School, located in a Chicago suburb. I believe it is important to promote Early Music particularly theorbo among young musicians so I was enthusiastic about being part of this project.

Much of my time the last few months has been taken up with repairs. I repair my own instruments and those by other makers that belong to my clients. Some of this work can be arranged in advance and I include it in my schedule. Others things arrive on short notice with tight deadlines. The owner of the first lute I want to show you contacted me in April. I was told it was from 1975 so I was looking forward to seeing it when it arrived last month.

The action had gotten far too high so I dis-assembled it and put it back together in proper alignment.

I like re-visiting my earlier work, not to see what I've done, not to be critical, but to see the story that belongs to each instrument. The bowl wood is Brazilian Rosewood. I found a plank of it at a neighbourhood lumber yard in East End Montreal around 1972 when I was living there. Wondering where there might be more I was sent to a warehouse in the suburbs. I found an aircraft hanger size building crammed floor to ceiling with the wood! The species is endangered and is now banned in international trade.

after Benedid 1783, Schreiner 2003

Other instruments unexpectedly develop problems and need to be looked after quickly. This photo arrived in an email Sunday night and the owner is now arranging to come to Toronto and to stay over while I fix it.

Unfortunately, some repairs that initially appear to be straight forward turn out to be nightmares.

 This is the neck block of a small theorbo with the neck and belly removed.  It is not one that I built but it belongs to one of my clients so I agreed to work on it.  I thought that only the neck joint had broken open, but it turned out that five of the eleven ribs of the bowl had, over time, come loose from the block. The lute had slowly folded up and become unplayable. While I worked on it one unwanted discovery led to another and what I scheduled as a simple repair -- wasn't!


Last month a lutenist who had recently moved to Ontario from Italy got in touch. The movers had damaged his archlute and he has a show scheduled for the middle of November.

The bowl was cracked through on the bass side of the end clasp leaving a jagged break and there was a nasty split in a soundboard. I removed the soundboard and carried out the repairs. I am just now touching up the varnish.







I still have two lutes waiting for my attention.

I have inserted knives to demonstrate the open joints

 One of my Kaiser theorbos (built 2000) was mistreated by baggage handlers on a flight to Charleston SC.  The neck joint popped which is fairly common and easy to fix. But the violence separated the soundboard tongue from the neck surface. They are both clean breaks but I will have to remove the soundboard in order to do the repair.

after Gerle, Schreiner 1996

 Good grief, how did this happen?

The rose is damaged but the broken parts will glue back without much trouble and the bridge is intact. The soundboard is a write-off. I'll salvage the rose and set it into a new soundboard.

 Also, I have gotten started on a special project. Toronto lutenist/guitarist Lucas Harris obtained an 1831 Giovanni Guadagnini guitar and I agreed to restore it. The work on this will go on for several more months. I am documenting everything so I will report on it in two or three posts when I am further along.



Next, I will finish the Checchucci guitar and in the coming months I'll finally get to work on new lutes; a couple of ten courses lutes, another Koch theorbo and a baroque guitar in A. That is the plan anyway.

 

The 'Warwick' Frei Lute

I recently finished a model of the 'Warwick' Hans Frei lute. The original is conserved in the Market Hall Museum, Warwick UK. Although it has been one of my favorite models I didn't blog about building it because it, or rather I, literally fell victim to fate when I broke my knee (requiring surgery) just after I finished assembling the bowl. This happened before I started blogging. Unable to complete the lute, I fitted a false top to the bowl so it would retain its shape and placed it on a shelf in my studio to await a better day. But I wanted to blog about the lute and decided to focus on the original. So this post is shaped in part by my thoughts, but also by responses to queries that I made to fellow lute makers and lutenists.


I recently found out that at much at the same time as I was finishing my model, Adam Busiakiewicz, a curator  and lutenist at the museum were the Hans Frei is conserved, announced the idea to organize a lecture/mini recital about the Warwick Frei. https://twitter.com/Adam_TakeMeOut . Although Adam was to play on his own Frei copy, the museum agreed to display their original Hans Frei which had not been seen in public for many years. This took place on September 10 and I am sorry not to have known about it earlier. I did confirm with the museum that the Frei will be on display until October 19. http://heritage.warwickshire.gov.uk/museum-service/ .

The Warwick Frei has long been a popular model for contemporary lute makers as a visit to any maker's website will attest. The history of its conversion from a renaissance to a baroque lute is frequently noted. But little has been written about it and few photos appear in the public domain. Adam posted this photo

https://twitter.com/Adam_TakeMeOut/status/360087189415153664/photo/1  of the lute being played in the 1950s.

My favorite article and the one I re-visited for this post is: Michael Prynne, Galpin Society Journal, vol. 2, 1949 that described the Frei with measurements and four excellent photos. Online, this article can be downloaded from JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/841395

When I started building lutes no plans were available for the Frei, so I scaled up one of the photos from Prynne's article. For many builders this was the only available option. When plans were published in 1979 I bought those, but they are now in tatters. I just ordered a new set from The Lute Society: http://www.lutesociety.org/pages/catalogue#ma

The Warwick Frei was in playable condition in the 1950s  and presumably it still is. Prynne wonderfully describes the tone; "The tone of the lute is sweet, though quite small, with a rather reedy quality in the lower register. The notes hold out for a long time, and the richness in overtones and comparative weakness of the fundamental note produce to a marked degree the very intimate and sympathetic tone which is the lute's essential character."

Prynne's remarks are revealing because they relate to a curious feature in the graduation of the thickness of the Frei soundboard. It tapers in thickness from the area behind the bridge where it is unusually thick to the area around the neck joint where the thickness is more normal. In my opinion this thickness is responsible for the richness, intimate and sympathetic tone but not for the smallness of tone. The treatment of the harmonic barring, size, shape and placement  regulate the strength of tone. That is what I found in building models of the Warwick Frei and I think it is also true for other historical instruments that have unusually thick soundboards.

I discovered that Jacob Heringman owned a Warwick Frei six course built by Michael Lowe with the original soundboard graduation. When I contacted Jacob he generously provided a lengthy account of his experience with the lute that includes a link to several tracks of his  Josquin des Prez CD where he uses his Frei. Jacob relates that Michael Lowe built the Frei six course with the graduated soundboard as an experiment and asked him to try it out before applying the finish with the intention of thinning the soundboard if he did not think that it worked. Jacob said:" My strong feeling was that he should definitely finish the instrument off leaving the soundboard as it was, without making any further changes. It felt pretty good right from the start, but I had the strong hunch that, because of the amount of wood in it, the instrument would take a long time to develop ... When the instrument was still brand new, I recorded several of the tracks on my CD of Josquin intabulations on it. It sounds striking and remarkable already on that recording http://heringman.com/Josquindepres.htm  Now, fourteen years on, it sounds even better, and it has certainly become more responsive and more nuanced as time has gone on... in my own collection, it's my favourite -- my 'desert island lute' and I'm so pleased that we kept our nerve and went through with the 'experiment'."

Building copies of historical instruments requires some detective work. Writing about them requires witnesses. I would like to thank David van Edwards, Bruce Brook and Tony Johnson : whose remarks I did not use but who pointed me in the right direction.

Theorbo after Christoph Koch

I finished my first model of the Christoph Koch theorbo, Venezia 1650, Number 3581, Musikinstrumenten Museum -- Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin. Earlier this year I travelled to Berlin, examined the instrument and reported on my study in this Blog on April 19, 2013. I spent the summer analyzing the templates that I made of the bowl and turning them into a workable mould. I was surprised by the lack of symmetry and I mentioned this in my earlier post but I wasn't ready for the problems this would cause in constructing a mould. Since I had wanted to replicate the shape of the lute's bowl accurately I was willing to put up with mis-alignments of individual ribs and I intended to include these features.

However, when I assembled the cross-sections and proceeded to check the rib contours with a flexible ruler, I could see that the irregularities would be a major problem. (My procedure for laying out rib lines is described in detail for another mould in two posts on May 8 and 17, 2012). On the original lute bowl the rib widths at any cross-section were approximately the same, but to maintain this uniformity, the edge contours were distorted.

 I pondered this difficulty for some time considering whether it was possible to remove the irregularities from the rib lines while maintaining the uniformity in width without altering the shape of the bowl. I decided that it wasn't. My solution was to start over.

Most of the irregularities are found on the bass side of the bowl. The treble side is  accurately assembled. I decided to make the bass side a mirror image of the treble side. If the lute bowl had been symmetrical in the first place this would have been the case. I assembled a new mould using the treble side contours. I felt this would result in a bowl that, while not a replica of the original, was representative of it.

 I constructed the bowl with East Indian rosewood ribs that I cut from the remains of a log that I have had since 1983. The triple spacers between the ribs are made of holly/ebony/holly.

The low profile of the bowl is obvious in this view. I was pleased that the contour lines of the ribs of my model are a close match with the original.

The Koch bowl is constructed with kingwood ribs

with triple spacers of ivory/kingwood/ivory.

This photo of my Koch shows the flow of the ribs over the rear of the bowl. When I examine an original lute I carefully measure and plot the position of each rib as it disappears under the end clasp. This is an important aid in reproducing this difficult area of the bowl shape.

I chose not to use as deep an end clasp as on the original. This doesn't alter the flow of the rib lines. Note that the angle between the fourth and fifth ribs (the first and last ribs are not visible) on each side is significantly tighter than the others. The angle on the bass side of the original is tighter than that on the treble. This feature is, in part, the reason that I had such difficulty in constructing the mould.

Note too, that the center rib is narrower than the others. These factors lead me to believe that the original bowl was not assembled on a mould but assembled from templates and not starting from the center and working outward, one rib after another, as is the method today but from each edge inward.

When I constructed a symmetrical mould by altering the bass side it affected the line of the ribs, not the contour of the face which was retained. By comparing the two photos you can see the slight different in the curving line through the middle third of the face and that in the lower quarter of the face from one side to the other.

I used 10 year old Italian spruce for the top, thinning it to just under 2 millimeters on the treble side, a little thinner on the bass and down to 1.1 millimeter around the rose area. I do not know the barring arrangement in the Koch theorbo so I assumed it was similar to that found in his archlute, E.546 Musée de la musique, Paris which is a standard design and similar to what I described in my post on the Kaiser theorbo from November 7, 2011.  Plans for the Koch archlute are available from the museum.

The distance that the bridge and rose are placed from the rear of the face affect the instrument's tone. I think it is important to respect the original location of these elements. Theorbo bridges are often off-set to the bass side as a result of balancing the alignment of the extension. I routinely set my theorbo bridges off center by 5 mm or so. The Koch bridge is off-set much more than this.  Although I chose to not to duplicate this feature, I did roughly follow the design and dimensions of the bridge.

The tips are missing from the wings of the original bridge so I finished my bridge in a design that could have been a continuation of the original.

Notice that the top front edge of the Koch bridge is smoothly canted back. I believe this was done to accommodate the metal diapasons that risked breaking if bent over a rounded but more abrupt edge. I liberally rounded the front edge of my bridge.









The rose is beautifully cut but the detail is somewhat obscured

by an accumulation of wax. I cut a different but similar design using the same location on the face and the same diameters as the original.

The neck and extension of the original theorbo are veneered with kingwood and elaborately inlaid with ivory arabesques. I used ebony and rosewood thinly cut to veneer the neck and extension. The latter I edged with holly/ebony/holly banding front and back.

The fretted string length of my Koch model is 84.6 centimeters with diapasons at 167.5 centimeters in a disposition of 7+7.

All photos by the author.

The Checchucci Guitar Rose -- An Inlaid Ring of "Ivory" Triangles

It was never been my intention to build an elaborate copy of the Checchucci guitar, but I did want to include those features that characterize its design. In my model I have preserved the inward sloping side ribs and the seventeen piece vaulted back of the original, but I laid aside the idea of producing the inlaid arabesques. For the soundboard I decided to replicate the ring of ivory triangles around the tiered rose. This presented several challenges both in the choice of materials and technique. The original design is created with ivory set in a black paste. Nowadays ivory is a prohibited material in many countries and substitutes are available so there is no justification for using it.

I used bleached cow bone purchased from a guitar supply company and sold as over-size blank saddle bone. For the black paste I used carbon black mixed with slow setting epoxy. This mixture flows into crevices, levels itself, dries to a low sheen and shrinks very little. It does have the potential to stain surrounding material that might be porous. I took precautions against this.

To begin, I routed a recess in the soundboard a little more than 1mm deep and with hide glue, glued two 1.5mm wide black/white/black strips of purfling to each side of the recess. I filled the recess between the two strips with lengths of plastic purfling material. This kept the black/white/black strips snuggly against the walls of the recess while the glue set but was removable because plastic doesn't stick well to hide glue.

There are thirty-two white triangles embedded in the ring. A close look reveals that they are not uniformly shaped. Some larger and others smaller, some are clearly right angles and some not. Certainly these were cut by hand and fitted individually. I intended to follow a like procedure but I wanted to be a little more accurate.

The first thing I did was to devise a way to lay out the spacing for the thirty-two triangles. The right hand figure is a circle divided into thirty-two  equal segments. I drew this with a rule and compass by dividing the circle into quarters and each quarter in half and so on until I had thirty-two segments. They were not quite equal. Sue had a better solution using Excel to make an accurately segmented pie chart.

I cut out the center of the diagram and taped it top the soundboard. This provided a clear guide to position each triangle. The recess for the triangles is 5mm wide so I prepared several strips of bone saddle material 1.2mm thick and 5mm wide. The triangles are not right triangles so there was no easy way to set up a cutting jig to insure accuracy.

Earlier in the year I bought a minature -- the table measures 10x12 inches -- precision table saw to make custom purfling strips. The machine is designed for model wooden boat builders and works perfectly for fine inlay pieces for lutes and guitars. I experimented with various angles on the cross cut guide until I found the one that resulted in the proper fit.

After that, the assembly of the ring went fairly quickly. The triangles fit snuggly but I glued them in place with a tiny drop of hide glue. I mentioned previously that the black paste I wanted to use to fill the recess around the triangles had the potential to stain both the soundboard and the bone. I masked the exposed soundboard and brushed a thin solution of lacquer over the top and edges of each bone triangle in order to seal them.









Then I mixed a paste of carbon black and slow setting epoxy and dabbled it around the triangles, pushing the paste into the corners with a tooth pick. I was careful to insure that the level of the paste was at least equal to the top of the triangles. Once the paste  dried I levelled the assembly with files.

The finished ring turned out quite nice. Tiny air bubbles formed in the corners of several of the triangles -- something I half expected. Before I finish the guitar I will dab some black paste into the offending holes and re-level them.

Next, I will construct the neck and peghead, assembling the guitar and stringing it for a trial before I apply the inlaid bone and black paste edging to the soundboard.

The tiered parchment rose is by Elena Dal Cortivo.

Checchucci Guitar - A Vaulted Back Body

 I have finished assembling the side ribs and vaulted back of my model of the Checchucci guitar. It was a delicate operation. The ribs and back of the original guitar are very thin, about 1 mm. Although the original instrument is intact, I was able to discern its over-all lightness and to estimate the thickness of the back and sides while examining the restoration photographs. These include a view of the vaulted back with a thumb size hole. Other views show the top edge of the side ribs with the soundboard removed.

In my last post I mentioned that I band sawed the face contour and retained the waste edges of the mould block in one piece as I was going to need them for support in cutting the longitudinal profile of the mould. They also proved useful for preserving the contour of the side ribs once they were bent. Sue and were going to be traveling in Europe for several weeks in April. I had finished contouring the vaulted back of the mould but I didn't want to start assembling the vaulted back because I knew that I couldn't finish it before we left and I didn't want to leave it half finished. But I did have time to prepare and bend the side ribs. I clamped them into the waste edges of the mould and left them until we returned home and I finished assembling the vaulted back.

For the vaulted back I prepared rib stock of macassar ebony about 1.1 mm thick. I also made  2mm wide white/black/white spacers by laminating 20 mm wide holly and ebony stock and then slicing off individual spacers. The ribs were bent to the necessary contour and shaped on an upside down jointer as seen in the top of the adjacent photo. I secured the center rib with positioning pins at each end and then applied one rib after another, alternating sides.

Each newly shaped rib was held in place with clear plastic tape and push pins. Throughout the assembly procedure the vaulting always felt fragile and as I neared completing the vault I left the plastic tape in place.

The work went quickly, in part, because Checchucci designed and constructed the vault in such a way that the shaping of each rib was simplified.

MFA Boston Restoration photo

The ribs are laid out so that the center facing edge of each rib is a straight line. I suspected this when I saw a photo of the back vault on the museum's website. When I visited the museum I arrived equipped with a straight flexible plastic ruler that I laid on the vaulted back along each rib line to test my hypothesis. Although the vaulted back was imperfectly constructed and distorted many of the ribs exhibited the center facing straight edge that I expected.

I laid out the ribs lines on my mould assuming that every rib conformed to my hypothesis. Having now assembled the vaulted back and side ribs I don't think I was completely correct.

During construction the vault always seemed fragile but when I finished gluing the vault to the side ribs I was satisfied that once I papered over the inside of the rib joints it would be stable in spite of its lightness.

I was to be disappointed. When glue dries on a papered joint it not only pulls the two sides of the joint more tightly together but it also pulls the joint down toward the inside of the instrument's body. On a arched body like a lute bowl the curvature of the ribs counteracts the downward pull and the ribs find an equilibrium.

This was not the case with the Checchucci vaulted back. The vault does not follow a uniform curve in the lower bout but flattens out over the last three ribs. I built this feature into my mould with the result that, when the glue dried on joints that I papered over, the joint between the third and fourth ribs from the edge collapsed.

The interesting point is that the original guitar suffered the same fate. In the photo it appears as a very slight deviation. If you follow the line of the joint between the third and fourth rib and the joint between the second and third ribs in the lower bout you can pick out the collapsed section just to the right of the glare.




I noticed this feature during my study of the guitar in Boston but I assumed that it was the result of distortion taking place over the long life of the guitar, not an inherit design flaw. The amount of distortion on both my guitar and the original Checchucci was only 1 mm, but it was a noticeable blemish.

Fixing the problem proved to be troublesome. I removed the three ribs that were affected by the collapsed joint and began to rebuild the area. By trial and error, in attempting to fit a new rib in place, I found that I needed to prop up the adjoining rib as seen in the photo, by about 1mm. This was possible because of the flexibility of the vault and side ribs.  The procedure not only increased the curvature of the vault slightly but also changed the shape of the new rib from one with a straight edge to one with a concave edge. This created a stronger joint that would resist the downward pull after papering over the inside of the joint. I was able to accommodate the last two ribs by filing down the side rib by a millimeter. This allowed each rib a little space to cant over, creating a slight sideways arch to an otherwise nearly flat slope.

So is this a faulty design?  I think it is a design that leaves little room for error. In instrument making there is a fine line between being in balance and being out of balance and success often depends on a finding the elusive balance.

Building replicas of historical models adds another dimension. One that is seems to be measurable, ought to be, but isn't quite.

Building the Jacopo Checchucci Guitar - The Mould

Jacopo Checchucci, MFA 2001.707, Boston.  Author's photo

Last April I measured the Checchucci guitar and posted a report on my work in this blog (April 25, 2012). During the summer I prepared a working drawing of the instrument and posted it on November 6 in a format that you can download and print. I always intended to build a model of this guitar and last month I got started. So far, I've built the mould, bent the side ribs and today I finished assembling the vaulted back.  Over the next weeks I will describe the techniques, discuss the problems and show you the results.

First the mould. I assembled a suitably sized block made up of  pine

and basswood boards salvaged from an old bench that I no longer needed. The template contour lying on the block is the outline of the face of the guitar that I made at the museum. I had taken particular care in making the template as accurate a representation of the original as possible.  To do so I removed the strings from the bridge and prepared a foam board with a recess cut in so that the guitar could lie flat on its face. A piece of card stock with a corresponding cut out completed the set up. I was then able to accurately trace the contour. I used the template to lay out the guitar body in my drawing and it serves again to lay out the mould.


As I noted in previous posts, the side ribs angle in from the face to the back in varying degrees, from 4 degrees at the waist to 2 degrees at neck and 3 or 3 1/2 elsewhere, as part of an intentional design.

However, I think Checchucci intended a more uniform outcome.  During assembly with the back and top the side ribs of any guitar have a tendency to splay out at the waist. This results in a greater angle, as was observed with this guitar.

 The neck joint area has distorted over time, accounting for the lesser degree of angle in this location. A crease in the smooth curve of the vaulting of the back behind the front block results from the upward pull of the strings.

Given the variation, I decided to make the mould with a uniform side rib angle of 3 degrees.

I band sawed the face contour and retained the waste edges of the block in one piece. I was going to need it for support in cutting the longitudinal profile of the mould.









Once I had the basic shape of the mould I started to contour the vaulting.

If it had been good weather outside I would have taken the mould out to the back deck, fastened it to a support and used a belt sander to make quick work of it. But, there was snow on the ground so I decided to work indoors. I used a block plane to form the vaulting, checking periodically with the templates that I made in the museum.





Once I was satisfied with the shape of the vaulting I used the cross-section template of the highest point of the vault to mark the location of the ribs.

For other locations on the surface of the mould I drew lines across the width at the upper and lower bouts and at the waist. I used the same number of ribs as the original so I divided the line at each location into the suitable number of equal parts. At each end of the mould I used photos to determine the most accurate termination points for the rib ends.

Stretching a thin, straight-sided  strip of wood across the surface of the mould and scribing a line took three hands. Sue helped out. The lines did not always intersect the points that I had marked on the mould, missing by a millimeter or so. In such cases I followed the line of the straight-sided strip of wood and allowed the rib widths to vary occasionally.

To finish the mould I planed facets for each rib with a miniature
plane and applied a coat of varnish to seal the wood and to help prevent the ribs from becoming glued to the mould.


Next time I'll show you the results of my work and describe what I've learned about the design of the vaulting and the technique for putting it together, but more importantly, how the two go hand and hand.