Dear all,
Alexander wrote:
> First of all, thanks very much for your drawing-comparison of different fret
> patterns (some of which are from the other source than Darryl Martin's
> drawing). I don't know what to say about the differences ... Maybe Darryl
> reads from this list and can comment on this. For the time being his drawing
> (and the accompanying measurements) is the only official source of
> information about the instrument, so I have little choice but rely on them.
Peter drew my attention to this - I have previously read the archives when I
got the chance, but it seemed worth joining the list.
Peter and I have had a productive (certainly for me) discussion about the
orpharion drawing and he has sent me various details he has about the
instrument. As a result I will make a revision of some parts of the drawing
following my next visit to Copenhagen (which will be in the new year) which
will allow me to place the finished drawing against the original. It is
something I normally would do, but most of the instruments I have drawn have
been in Edinburgh which makes life a lot easier.
In any case it seems sensible to say how I measured the fret positions. They
were measured on two separate visits. The first visit I measured the ends
(bass and treble) of the frets from the nut using a vernier caliper to the
nearest 1/20 of a millimetre. Obviously my caliper is only 150mm long so I had
to then take measurements from a different starting position. In order to
check I wasn't going off I also double measured the nut to fret 12 position
with a steel ruler. On the second visit I measured from the nut to the fret at
the middle of the fingerboard as a means of triangulating the result in the
same manner. There is obviously a slight error there since it is not easy to
determine where the middle of the fingerboard is. Unless I found a large
difference I assumed that my first set of measurements were correct, since they
can be measured with a greater assurance of accuracy.
When making the drawing I worked out the number of cents of each fret
compared to the open string length (taken as twice the nut to fret 12
distance). With the exception of frets 7 and 9 the deviation is no more than 4
cents. I calculated the error in millimetres to get the same cents on both
sides which shows that (again with the exception of those two frets) the error
doesn't exceed about 0.6mm, which I think is pretty accurate fretting on the
whole (especially as Palmer used wedges which I think increases the scope for
error, although others more experienced may well disagree on that). Using the
triangulation check it is clear that fret 9 is spot on and that Palmer was just
a bit more inaccurate there. There is a difference in fret 7 where the treble
is 8 cents sharper than the bass. Using the triangulation suggests I could
have misread the caliper and it should be 172.7 not 173.7 from the nut, which
is 695.25 cents rather than 700.45 cents - that will need to be
checked against the instrument when I see it again - the photographs I have
don't give me a clear answer to that. If I am reading Peter's chart correctly
his rubbing gives a treble fret 7 even sharper than my 700.45 cents. Peter has
sent me a copy of his fingerboard rubbing, but it hasn't reached my hands yet,
so I may be able to comment further then.
Sorry, that seems a long explanation of what I did in practice, but hopefully
it will allow those interested to see the processes I followed in a transparent
way.
Darryl
---------------------------------
Sent from Yahoo! - the World's favourite mail.
--
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
