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Luthery
Posts about Luthery
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Over the course of building the tin-can cello, I've searched around a few times for precursors [1, 2]. I've been a bit surprised at how few examples of an instrument with a metal soundboard I've been able to find! Here are some projects I've had in mind recently:
The tin-can cello. This is the project most of my blogging has been about recently, a cello with a washtub body, with the base of the tub as soundboard.
A 4-stringed viola da gamba sort of instrument with a wok (bronze) as its soundboard and an arched maple back, and steel strings. I'm not really sure yet of what the scale length will be or what gauge of strings I'll be using. I'm thinking the strings will be tuned to E, A, D, G but I don't know in what octave.
A banjo-style instrument with a cymbal as its soundboard.
A violin made from pounded-out sheet metal (with a wooden neck/scroll/fingerboard). If bronze can be found in sheet form and is strong enough, I'd like to use it. Otherwise steel. [Looks like sheet bronze, brass, and steel can be had from onlinemetals.com]
A (high-tin) bronze urn or vase or bowl (singing bowl?) or bucket, fitted with a wooden neck and bridge, and strings.
An erhu with a coffee can resonator.
A violin (or soprano violin?) with a cookie tin resonator.
A contrabass with a bell as its resonating chamber.
posted evening of November 27th, 2018: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Projects
A dilruba could be built with a gourd body. (note Not nearly enough tension to support a washtub construction, though.) The neck might be cherry -- the shape of it seems pretty easy to build, much much simpler than a sitar neck. (I am thinking here that the neck is not hollow, I'll need to check that.) Friction pegs for the tarif strings could easily be let in to the side of the neck with the string winding on the outside. The bridge will be maple and the nut cocobolo. Or a cocobolo bridge even! That could be made pretty thin.
posted afternoon of December 16th, 2018: 1 response ➳ More posts about Music
The tin-can cello had a strong wolf tone when playing B, especially noticeable on the A string. Last night I fixed it with an improvised wolf tone eliminator:
My thinking was that the wolf tone eliminators I've seen for sale are just a method of adding a little mass and damping to the afterlength of the string. I thought a fishing weight would do nicely and not have any moving parts to come loose. It works like a charm -- the B on the A string sounds clear and true, and it sounds fine on other strings as well though there is not as much of a stark difference... I don't hear wolf tone anywhere else.
Following in the footsteps of Stefano Matteucci, a violin could be made using a small bodhrán for a body. Possibly tuned in a higher register than a violin, like an octave up from viola. You would want to minimize the angle of the strings crossing the bridge, to save undue pressure on the drum skin.
Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one's own...)
For a while I have had in mind making a viola da gamba type of instrument with a steel wok as its soundboard and an arched maple back. An interesting question is how do you attach the wood to the metal -- I have had in mind screwing it together. Just now I had the thought that a thin wooden lining could be glued to the metal (I guess with Gorilla Glue?) and then attach the back with hide glue.
This way I can make the back much thinner, like a violin back, and not need thickness to screw into. No need to drill holes in the metal -- much better.
