Lute Building Course at the LSA LuteFest in Cleveland, June 23-29 2024 (With Bonus Video!)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Lute's Progress! I have some exciting news...

I've been asked to join the faculty of the Lute Society of America's LuteFest 2024! As you may know, the LuteFest takes place from June 23-29 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. It's a beautiful campus, and a great setting for the LuteFest. The faculty is stellar, the classes look amazing, and the concert series is not to be missed! Check out all the details and sign up to attend at the LSA website:  https://lutesocietyofamerica.org/events/

The Lute Building Class

I'll be teaching the Lute Building course, so whether you're an experienced maker, or you're interested in getting started building a lute, or just want an insight into how these incredible instruments get put together, the Lute Building class is the place for you. We welcome all participants, of all levels of skill and experience. We'll have a dedicated workshop room, and I'll be talking about, and demonstrating, lots of lute building techniques, including:

--building a mold

--rose carving

--fitting, shaping and grooving a nut

--material selection, shaping and thicknessing

--bending wood

--care and safe use of hand tools

--any other lute related topics that you would like to find out more about. Bring your questions to the Lute Shop!

The Lute Doctor

I'm also going to be the Lute Doctor at the LuteFest, which means that I'll be doing repairs and maintenance work on Festival participants' instruments throughout the week. Along with general maintenance items like tying a new set of frets and getting stuck pegs running smoothly, there is usually a fair amount of repair work that needs to be done. I've already been contacted by a festival participant who has two instruments, a lute and a vihuela, whose bridges have come off, so I will be going through the complete procedure for gluing these back down securely. There are bound to be lots of other challenging and interesting repairs that need doing throughout the week, and you are welcome to stay and watch.

If you have a lute that needs repairs or maintenance, bring it down to the Lute Shop. And if you want to find out more about how you can keep your lute in good running order, you are invited to stick around and see how it's done--and even try it yourself. Some lute maintenance topics I'll be covering include:

--tying frets

--changing strings

--stringing, materials and tensions

--peg maintenance

--general care and attention to keep any lute running smoothly 

Topics in Lute Design

As a lute maker, I'm fascinated by the process of how we take information on historical lutes and use it to make instruments for modern players. I want to look at a few specific historical instruments that form the core of modern lute making practice, and see how lute makers have changed or adapted them suit the needs of modern players. Some of the topics include:

–Looking at museum drawings of a number of important historical instruments

–Thinking about how we can and should adapt them, to make them into useful instruments for modern players

–Thinking about how tuning and pitch level dictate the kind of model you can and should use for a given type of lute

–Short list of historical instruments under consideration:

–Warwick Frei

–C45 Tieffenbrucher archlute

–1592 Venere

–Sellas archlutes

–Sixtus Rauwulf 10-11c (Jakob Lindberg coll.)

–Surviving lutes and fragments by Laux Maler

Note to Participants

If you are thinking of attending my lute making course, I would encourage you to bring some things along with you. If you have hand tools that you have found especially useful (or that you have questions about how to use), please bring them, and we will discuss.  If you have any tools or jigs that you have made that are especially useful in the shop, please bring them too. Sometimes the most satisfying part of lute making is inventing a tool or jig that helps you get the job done right!

I plan to bring with me a pretty comprehensive selection of drawings of historical lutes. Some of these are museum drawings; some are my own (unpublished) drawings of historical lutes; some are tracings of drawings of historical lutes that I have kindly received from other luthiers over the years. If you want to make copies of any of these drawings, I will make them available under two conditions: first of all, the drawings can’t be taken off the premises, and second, no electronic copying is allowed. In other words, if you want copies of any of these important and rare drawings, you will need to trace them manually. So, you’ll need to bring your own tracing paper (I suggest buying a roll of 24” wide tracing paper or drafting vellum), your own pencils, and your own drafting tools (e.g., compass, squares, straight edge, flexible curve, etc.) I’ve been assured that a large table will be made available for participants to use for this purpose. It’s a rare opportunity–some of these drawings are no longer available, and some were never made publicly available at all. If you are interested in historical lute making, or want to expand your repertoire of lutes, you should plan to do some tracing.

See you in Cleveland!

And now, a special added bonus...

A video of me in the workshop yesterday, gluing a peg box onto a five course lute. Enjoy!

The Return of the Betterizer

 Hi. I recently experienced a tiny brainwave in my workshop, and I'd like to share it with you.

I've got a couple of lute backs here, and both are for a 5 course late medieval plectrum lute. The one nearest is made of curly ash; the one behind is of curly sycamore.

In the foreground is a contraption that I have described in a previous post, a locking turntable and block that are screwed up to the underside of the lute mold, and then held in a large ratchet clamp in my bench vise. The setup looks a little ungainly but it works great, since it allows me to hold the mold in practically any orientation. It's very useful when I'm building the back, fitting and gluing ribs, and working side-to-side (that is, working alternately on bass- and treble-side ribs), since I can simply loosen the knurled nuts under the turntable to spin the mold around. It's even more useful when I'm carving a lute mold, because that's an operation where it's helpful to see and carve the developing shape from as many angles and perspectives as possible.

So here's my brainwave. I decided to try attaching this universal-joint contraption to the lute back after it's been taken off the mold, to see if I could use it for scraping the back, resolving the rib lines, and giving the back a beautiful shape.

Now, I always do some initial filing of rib joints and scraping of ribs while the back is still on the mold; it's necessary, for instance, to get a shape that's pretty close to perfect at least on the bottom end of the body, in preparation for fitting and gluing the capping strip. 

But once the capping strip is glued on, I'm usually happy to get the back off the mold and reinforce it from the inside: glue paper strips on all the rib joints (and sometimes across the ribs too), glue in the counter cap, fit the false belly, and so on. Generally I don't work with the shape of the back again until later in the construction process, when I'm finishing out the whole lute in preparation for varnish.

The trouble with leaving rib/ body work till that late stage is that by then I'm working with an almost fully assembled lute, and there's no way to hold it completely steadily. The best way to hold it securely is in my lap, against the padded edge of my workbench. And as you can see, that puts me in the middle of a lot of wood dust (which I'm becoming more and more sensitive to every day.)

So, in an effort to separate me a bit from that cloud of dust, I thought I might try doing some of this work earlier in the process, by holding the back steadily in the vise.

Here's what I came up with. The false belly--the closely-fitted piece of panel board that temporarily maintains the shape of the body during the construction process--has been spot-glued into the completed back. I then pre-drilled four screw holes.

I screwed the block/ turntable assembly to the false belly, with a coupe of #10-2" screws. 

I then mounted the thing in the clamp in my bench vise. My only question at this point was whether the whole thing would be tight and sturdy enough to withstand the pressures of being worked on with files and scrapers (or whether, for instance, the spot-glues on the false belly might not hold.) The answer is: yes, it is strong and steady. I feel I need to be a little careful in handling the back when re-positioning it, but otherwise the assembly is very stable. 

That's my brainwave. It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? And yet in a way, it is. It gives me a little more flexibility in assembling lutes, because it allows me to change up the sequence of construction. So, instead of waiting to the very end of the building process to resolve and tighten up all the rib lines, I can do it earlier on, and with more control. Or, I can do it later. It doesn't matter. The important thing is, I now have the choice. And the best part is, it didn't cost me a dime!

As some of you may know, I love betterizing: taking a contraption and adding to it or modifying it to extend its life or usefulness. I encourage you to betterize in your own workshop, and share the news with the world.

Here's a short video I made of the contraption in action. Enjoy.