Hello All, and thanks for this discussion. I have an 8 course Renaissance lute which I recently used to play and record a piece a whole step higher. Instead of arduously fingered transposing, I strapped a nickel-silver section of a candle holder across the fingerboard at the 2nd fret with thick hair ties. This is no joke - it worked quite well. While it probably would have been better to acquire an instrument designed to be pitched higher, I don't have that kind of expendable income, so I improvised. A 1/4 x 5 or 6 machine screw with a solid shaft would probably work just as well. All the best, Tom
From: Dan Winheld <dwinh...@lmi.net> Subject: [LUTE] Re: Capo use on early instruments Another good point- the only lute for which I built my own capo (pain in the butt piece of fussy work) was a 72 cm SL "Division" bass lute that worked very well as an "E" lute (a-415 or 440) with a generous 10 fret neck, and narrow-ish sloping shoulders at the neck-body joint. But, in order to work, required equal tempered frets. Great instrument for accompaniment as well as a substantial amount of solo work. But a 58 - 62 cm SL, 8-fret neck tenor lute with meantone fretting? forget the damn capo! Dan On 9/25/2013 4:13 PM, R. Mattes wrote: >> He makes the point that they did it in this way because the vihuela >> >had only 10 frets and a capo on the fingerboard would have reduced >> >this to 9. > and lutes only had 7 or 8 frets ... > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html Tom Draughon Heartistry Music http://www.heartistrymusic.com/artists_tom.html 714 9th Avenue West Ashland, WI 54806 715-682-9362
