On Dec 15, 2007, at 4:44 AM, Martin Shepherd wrote: > Rob MacKillop has just recorded a piece with the little finger on > the bridge...
> Has anyone else tried this? If iconography is anything to go by, I would say quite a few. The little finger on the bridge is a little extreme, but it looks as though just about everyone in the 17th and 18th centuries seem to have played with some version or other of thumb-out. Many of us in the 20th-C revival days gave up thumb-out altogether, and for 16th-Century playing I still think thumb-under is the best way to go. But now, in the post-revival period, we're taking a fresh look at thumb-out and I personally am glad to see that. It seems to have been the way lutenists played for at least half of the 300 year reign of the the lute as a household instrument. For me personally: Advantages of thumb-out playing are that I can get greater resonance playing close to the bridge, which can mean more volume, but usually just a bigger sound (bearing in mind that I play large instruments); and more facile articulation with thumb and fingers not so closely associated in function as they are in thumb-under. The main disadvantage is that I don't always get the tone quality I want. It sounds coarse to me, possibly because I'm not using gut. Tone quality, as someone recently reminded us on an earlier thread, is everything. So the challenge as I see it is to develop ways to get acceptable tone quality out of thumb-out (even using sythetic strings). David R [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
