ron fernandez wrote: > Greetings, > > I have posted photos on my website of a small Portuguese guitarra I own > (circa 1890) made in Lisbon by João Miguel Andrade and imported into > England by Alban Voigt who published an English language method for > playing the Portuguese guitarra. > I was interested in the tutor by Havelock Mason. A few months ago someone was selling it (as a photocopy, I think) on ebay in Britain. They wanted £25 - bit steep, I thought.
Anyway, the G tuning given in Mason's book. Almost all English guitars (and variants) in the eighteenth century had the top four 'courses' as doubles and the lower strings as singles. I still don't know if there is a satisfactory answer why this was so. But the tuning Mason gives: gG, bB,dD, gg,bb,dd not only has lower strings in pairs but in octaves too. Perhaps it's a sort of half-way stage between the old tuning and the modern one. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
