Hi, I've experimented with quill and have found it difficult to get right, although I haven't been able to get my hands on very many appropriate feathers to try it out as much as I'd like. They've all broken pretty quickly. Several years ago when I was in Turkey and met some saz players I was hoping they could enlighten me, but they were all using long plastic strips. A mandolin player here in Italy gave me a small tortoise shell pick (he assured me it was an antique), so I've been using that - the round end rather than the pointed end.
If you look in John Ward's Sprightly and Cheerful Music, I think you'll find that the sources use the word quill. Whether that actually means quill or was a synonym for plectrum is another question. A few years ago, maybe 9 or 10 now, there was a lute festival in Rome, mostly players from the North Africa and the Eastern Med. One of them - in fact the only guy whose lute had frets - used a quill. I couldn't talk to him later or even get a look at it, so I don't know whether or how he'd split it, but it seemed from the outside to be the whole feather. The feathery part stuck out of his hand between the first and second finger and danced around as he played. It was jet black and rather loosely feathered, if you know what I mean, but the feathers weren't that long. The whole feather seemed to be about 15cm / 6in long. Now that I think about it, there were two lutes in that group - this one with frets and modern tuning machines, and another more traditional, large 'ud. I think they were from Egypt. What kind of feathers are you using? I think I've mentioned before that Carlo Cecchoni has been experimenting with wooden plectra. He's made some very interesting ones from laminated bark. I forget which source he found it in, but he specializes in early Roman mandolins, late 17th - early 18th centuries. Doc To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
