On Oct 10, 2009, at 3:31 PM, Guy Smith wrote: > The feather he recommended using - the thin end of an ostrich feather, > stripped down to just the spine - isn't all that different from a > guitar > string, just more fragile. He did have a well-developed > historically-based > rationale for using a plectrum of this sort, but I don't recall the > details.
It probably had to do with the vast herds of ostriches roaming over Europe in the late Middle Ages. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
