Toby Rider wrote:
Whoa! slow down... take a look at -Oswald himself specialised in guittar (English guittar) which has a sound like a very quiet harp or lyre. It's also a very easy instrument to write music with, as it transposes and the tuning forms two major chords (CEGceg, GBDgbd or AC#Eac#e normally).Are there any pictures of these instruments online? I'm going to have a load of questions about these once I see pictures of them :-)But Chris Egerton, a luthier in London, has just made me an entire set of bone string pins and it's sounding very good as a result! DavidWow, how well do those bone pegs work? Are they subject to the same problems that the wooden pegs on fiddles are?
http://www.maxwellplace.demon.co.uk/pandemonium/guittar.html
and also at
http://www.robmackillop.com/
The bone string pins are at the *other end* of the instrument, the tailpiece, and you loop the wire round them (I will shortly replace that photo with the beautiful pins that Chris made for me). The tuner mechanism is different from anything you will have seen apart from a Portugese guitarra or German waldzither, and operates using a captive nut on a threaded shaft, turned by a watch key. The closest equivalent is the fine tuner on a fiddle but the action is entirely different. The instrument uses double-loop-ended strings which must be made up to measure, and the range of possible tension is limited, but the tuning accuracy and 'hold' is 100 per cent.
The guittar was extremely popular in 18th century Scotland, and over in Massachussetts the 'cittern' (which it gradually replaced) outstripped the fiddle as the most popular instrument in the early 1700s. There are loads of surviving guittars in museums (Edinburgh Reid Collection, Colonial Williamsburg Museum, University of Leipzig collection) but very few being played by anyone today. Rob reckons there are maybe six concert-level performers in the world, and after I got mine (folk level playing, sadly) he said 'that now makes two in Scotland'!
It survived as the waldzither, losing one string, in Germany but was killed off when Hitler encouraged German folk music (and effectively signed its death warrant). The closest living relative is the 4-course folk cittern, but most players would never use a guittar type tuning. Banjo and dobro players use the tuning all the time, however, so a book of banjo chord shapes helps a long way to playing guittar or waldzither.
David
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