Dear Saw 192837, You ask many important questions, all of which deserve a longer answer than I offer below.
Frets on the lute are made of gut, and are tied round the neck, rather than fixed in place on the fingerboard. The advantage is that they can be moved to where you want them to go. They will wear out eventually, depending on how much playing you do, but they are easy to replace with a simple knot. Instruments like the cittern and bandora have metal frets, because they have metal strings which would quickly wear out gut frets. Whether you choose to use gut strings or nylon strings is up to you. Some people prefer nylon, others gut. The strings are different, of course, and produce different sounds. For example, the lowest strings will ring on more, if they are made of nylon. When you say "old-style tuners", I assume you mean the tuning pegs on a lute, as opposed to the machine heads on a guitar. If the pegs are well set up, with a little peg grease applied, they should be no more problematic than machine heads. In fact they can often work better. Using a tuning box may help you tune the lute. At some stage you might want to try different temperaments, in which case you may want to get a sophisticated tuning box which can offer alternatives to equal temperament. The important thing to remember is that guitars and lutes cannot be tuned exactly. You have to compromise. When people start playing the guitar or lute, they find tuning difficult; then they get the hang of it, and it seems easy; then their ears get better at hearing slight differences of pitch, and the whole tuning thing gets to be impossible. Use a tuning box to help your ears learn what to hear, not to do the listening for them. The lute and the modern classical guitar have different right-hand techniques. You can get away with using lute technique on the guitar or guitar technique on a lute, but the results are less than satisfactory. I think you should decide which instrument takes priority, and use the same technique for both instruments. There are some players who can switch from one technique to the other, and that's fine, but there still remains the problem of deciding whether to play with or without nails. Having an extra course or two should not cause too many problems. The more strings you have, the more you need to develop the use of rest-strokes with the thumb. If you are choosing the number of strings you want your lute to have, you need to think of the music you want to play, not how much the lute will differ from the guitar. For example, have a 6-course lute for Francesco da Milano, a 7-course lute for Dowland, an 11-course lute for 17th-century French music, 13 courses for 18th-century German baroque music, and so on. Many people opt for an 8-course lute as an all-purpose renaissance lute, and there is much to be said for doing that. How difficult or easy an instrument is, is determined by your own ability and the music you want to play. If you have stuck at the guitar every day for nine months, there won't be much wrong with your ability. Start with some simple pieces on the lute, and everything will be fine. Best wishes, Stewrat McCoy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "saw 192837" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 1:20 AM Subject: [LUTE] New Boy wants lute > Howdy > > > I am a guitar player (played everyday for about 9 months). Now I'm ready to > try a lute. > > Questions: > > Why are frets made with 'gut' on a lute? Does this mean they wear out, if so > how do you fix them yourself or do you need to be a professional? > > Do you use gut string with lutes? Will nylon ruin the sound? > > How bad are the old-style tuners? I heard they go out of tune a lot. Is this > true, if so does it ruin the whole thing? > > If you get anything other than a 6 course lute, will it ruin your guitar > playing? Or not? I still want to play guitar > > Is a 6 course easier to play than 7-8 course? Or not? > > How much more difficult is it to play a lute versus a guitar? To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
