Dear lutenists, I drove over to Palo Alto (after stopping by Cupertino, California, to play duets with another renaissance lutenist today) and visited Gryphon music to look at a baroque lute Franklin Lei reported seeing in their shop a few weeks ago. They are pretty rare to locate in this area these days....
You can look at the lute at http://www.gryphonstrings.com/instpix/22683/22683.html I waited around and finally got a chance to ask if I could look at it. It is in a fairly large Harptone case, and it is described as a 1990 Chris G. Pantazelos "English Renaissance 13 Course lute." It is fairly interesting. Built in Boston in 1990 by a luthier previously unknown to me, it is about 70 cm string length, fairly lightweight baroque lute, with a bass rider, a little crudely fashioned, and a little atypical. The bowl is alternating Maple/Cherry ribs as you see, 13 courses, but in a configuration of 1 x 1, 2 x 12. It has a doubled second course. The neck is fairly wide, I think wider than usual, but spacing at the nut and bridge seem to be ok. The action is very low and would need to be raised a little to make it more playable without hitting the soundboard, it would not be too bad, perhaps a capping strip on the bridge. The rose is a little crude, and the pegbox is very simple and (I would say) thin blocks of wood for the pegs to anchor into. The pegs are serviceable. The frets are tied on strips of nylon and the strings tent to buzz on the frets and between themselves... The spacing between the octaves and fundamentals may need to be adjusted. On the whole, not a bad lute, needs a little work I think to make it more playable. Tone is not too bad. I guess you could either leave one of the strings off on the second course and make it a baroque lute, or put it in French Flat tuning or "viel ton" for Thomas Mace English 17th century lute pieces. But perhaps a bit overpriced at $1500.00. It would need a quite a bit of adjusting. Mike Peterson To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
