Stuart Walsh wrote: > I didn't realise that the double headed lute had single basses. And the > 'flat' tuning has the top three courses, c-e-g?
Hi Stuart, I think I see what you mean. But, no, the bass courses are all double. The dark bass strings are loaded-gut fundamentals, and the octave strings are plain gut strings. You can't see the octave strings on your screen, probably, because the video is a bit blurred. That's due to the auto-focus feature of the camera which makes noise anytime it works, and it works constantly when you move. I wanted to skirt this by not focusing the cam on the lute and me directly. That's why the shelf in the back may be slightly sharper than the lute, and you cannot see the slim strings. You can't even hear the octaves, possibly. That's because I have their actions lower than those of the fundamentals. It's due to two reasons. The first is, I chose quite low tension strings. I wanted to try low tension as it has been praised by Toyohiko Satoh quite a lot. Additionally, I wanted to be able to switch between flat and sharp tunings without having to replace strings of the 1st and 3rd courses. That causes problems with the bass courses, though, since bass courses with very low tension will clash more often than not (unless you get used to an extraordinarily soft thumb attack). That can be avoided by pulling the fundamentals up a bit at the bridge. The second reason is, I want to hear the fundamental more than the octave. The octave is to brighten the tone as a whole, but I don't want it to double the fundamental in the upper octave, as though the octave were an independent voice. With fundamentals up, the thumb gently sweeps over the octaves behind and doesn't fully hit it. Mathias To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
