Because a good Lute by a master craftsman is more a work of art than the sum
total of a bunch of wooden elements shaped by hand and glued together. Most
who play the Lute can tell from the quality of the sound whether the Lute is
the work of skill and artistry or the product of some sort of paint by the
numbers operation somewhere where labor is figured in the essentials of a
desperate life. In short a good Lute costs what it costs because that is
what the market is. You being a business man should appreciate that, or at
least understand it. My father had a saying: A thing is only worth what
someone is willing to pay for it. There are many Lute players that are
willing to pay high prices for the kind of Lutes some builders are capable
to producing.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Seth Appel" <seth.ap...@gmail.com>
To: <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 3:18 PM
Subject: [LUTE] : Cost of a lute?
So the thread about student lutes and costs has got my brain working...
and let me state right away that by profession I am a business man and
not am musician.
Why does a lute cost as much as it does?
Is it materials?
Labor?
A price premium for know-how?
Are the Pakistani lutes cheap (in both the good and bad sense) because
they are using poor materials, or is it because the craftspeople simple
don't know how to make them better? Could an accomplished luthier go
to Pakistan and work with them for a month and enable them to start
producing truly good lutes at the same price?
Or would this transformation take years of education and training?
I wouldn't expect the Pakistani factory to produce master peices, but,
as noted earlier, if someone can produce passable violins at $300, and
lord knows there are plenty of cheap but OK guitars around, it escapes
me why there are not cheap but OK lutes in the marketplace.
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 2:18 PM, marius david cruceru
<[1]marius.cruc...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, Luther,
My suggestion is to contact mister Lorinczi. He is living in
Romania, in Tg. Mures.
He made my lute, A VEnere, 8, a beautiful instrument,
contact me to give you his email address to negociate the price.
Would you like to have a REnnassaince Lute or a Baroque?
Let me know if you are interested.
best regards
marius david cruceru
romania
[2]nedma...@aol.com wrote:
As Chris said, don't give up Luther. I found two very nice
instruments
on Wayne's list at good prices (I have an instrument on order from
Dan
Larson). But before I found those instruments, I did a lot of
practicing on a guitar using lute technique as best I could from some
investigation. Put on a light set of strings and give it a try. I
didn't use a capo, but you could to shorten the string length and
bring
the pitch up g'. This would at least get you going in a lute
direction
until you find an affordable instrument.
Ned
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To get on or off this list see list information at
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--
References
1. mailto:marius.cruc...@gmail.com
2. mailto:nedma...@aol.com
3. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
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