Andrew Gibbs points out: 17th c. harpsichord makers added another feature called a buff stop that had the opposite effect - it pressed leather pads against the strings to mute them. French and German makers called this respectively a 'registre de luth' or 'Lautenzug'.
And asks" I have no idea why this would be considered lute-like - unless lute players were damping the strings with the heel of their right hand? If you were a harpsichord builder and wanted to make a stop that approximated two features that distinguished lute sound from harpsichord sound -- the less metallic sound of gut strings and the quicker decay that those less dense strings had -- how else would you do it? But I agree with Andrew (if indeed he meant to make this point) that it's a mistake to extrapolate lute tone from the names of harpsichord stops, as the opposite conclusions you could draw from the English lute stop and the French/German one show. Either stop may have been an attempt to evoke, rather than copy, the lute sound, rather like an impressionist exaggerates a few features of the famous person he's imitating. Or it may simply be that a harpsichord maker came up with an effect he liked and had to call it something, and it sounded more like a lute than a violin or trombone. For some perspective, consider the "bassoon stop" on late 18th- century pianos. It was a strip of parchment that touched the strings and made them buzz. It didn't sound like a bassoon, but it did sound more like a bassoon than it sounded like a violin or trombone. Any bassoonist who used it as any sort of guide in his playing would be on a fool's errand. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
