July 2009 Archives

What good is an instrument if you have nothing to play it with? Jean-Claude, our savior, did the hard work of expertly carving the pernambuco hardwood into the right shape for a nyckelharpa bow, which is a smaller device than the violin bow:

In order to hold its shape correctly, the bow wood must be heated briefly in a hot (alcohol) flame:

Now both key elements, the bow and the "frog" which holds the bowhair in place, are ready:

A small wire will hold the frog in place, while allowing for adjustability:

And what would a bow be without hair? As with the animal bone earlier, we were grateful for the language barrier that allowed us to not ask very many questions about what had happened to the horses that these tails were previously connected to:

If you've never stretched hair on a bow before, be glad. All the hairs have to be exactly at the same tension and position laterally. Be sure not to crush the expensive pernambuco wood in the vise, either. There's a reason I was too busy to take very many pictures during this task.

By far the trickiest part of this whole process so far is the insertion, after the whole body is glued together, of a small dowel called the sound post. This tiny piece of wood is responsible for transferring the vibration of the front to the back cover. Because of this involvement with resonance, the post can't be glued in place or otherwise fixed through any method other than force and friction. I was a bit skeptical that we could ever size the dowel correctly: too small and it will easily slip out of place; too large and it would never be possible to move it into place from a diagonal position. Somehow it all came together, and gave us our first experience with a special tool called a "sound post retriever." This is a long piece of metal with sharp wedge on the end. After impaling the post on the wedge, you insert the whole apparatus the soundhole. Once in position, you tilt the retriever carefully, catching one edge of the dowel on the bottom of the case and slowly pulling the post towards you, the friction of the wedge holding the post fast until it's perpendicular to the top and bottom. At that point, a final yank separates the retriever from the post itself, and the system is sonically connected and complete.

If you've done everything correctly, this is what you end up with:

This is a pretty critical part of the instrument: the soundbridge, as on a violin or similar stringed instrument, is one of the main parts responsible for transmitting the vibration of the strings to the body of the instrument itself. Unlike what I thought before I started this whole process, the soundbridge is not glued or held in place by anything other than the tension of the strings. We'll start with a pretty rough shape:

...and continue to shape it:

The six sympathetic strings on this instrument are held up by the lower part of the bridge:

As the six sympathetic strings stretch from the head, they need some sort of fixed support on which to rest, since they pass well below the keyboard above. We'll accomplish this with two large staples, on for each set of three, which provide a strong surface on which the strings rest. To keep each of sets strings separate from each other, we'll drive three nails in each side, cutting off their larger heads with a set of pliers:

At the other end of the instrument, as the sympathetic strings pass the bridge and come to the tail, we need a similar piece to create a nice, clean edge. For this location, we'll carve a piece of animal bone (!) into a sharp, triangular shape:

A test fitting, to see how the strings all fit together:

We'll continue to work on the bridge, adding a heart-shaped hole in the middle to lighten it and allow it to vibrate more easily. When we're done, it will look like this:

Today's activity in the workshop consists mainly of piecing together the framework which holds all the various keys in place and in the right position. We need to form this frame out of a series of thin strips, since the keys themselves are too large to fully slide in. We'll build up a series of layers, like a cake, and insert keys at each stage. Here goes the first one:

Now we've got a second layer on top of that. Notice what the three pieces of wood are sitting on top of? It's soft leather, with an adhesive background:

Now we need to trim this leather very precisely:

Here's what the leather surface looks like after we've trimmed off the edges neatly and folded the flaps in:

The leather performs a very important function: stopping the individual keys from rattling around and creating unwanted noise, even when the instrument is played with a lot of energy. Now, to place the bottom layer of the keyboard frame onto the body itself:

Looks good!

Time for a test fitting of the keys! These haven't been chamfered, sanded or stained yet:

Those poles sticking up from the keys are called leaves, and are what actually make contact against the strings when a key is pressed. They would be a real headache to cut and shape one by one. Luckily, computer-controlled machinery can help us out by routing out a whole bunch at once:

Time for a test fitting of the next row of keys:

Looks like everything is fitting together well!

After a half-day of work on Sunday, followed by a brief trip to relax in Nancy, we're back in the workshop Monday to see take off the clamps and see how the body came out:

Great! Now we have something that looks like a middle-school reënactment of Scream:

In order to get this looking more like a polished instrument, we're going to need to round off the corners using a progression of tools, from rough to very fine. We'll start by rasping the edges to curve:

We'll also scrape down the front face with a sharp metal sheet:

Then it's time to rub down the wooden bodies with a wet sponge -- this causes the wood to expand very slightly. We'll set them outside to dry:

Once the bodies have dried, we need to decided what color we want them to be. The shade is determined by two factors: the stain itself, and then the wax we put on top of it. Here's a sample of the available stains:

As it turns out, all four of us chose the stain on the far left, so we didn't get a chance to see how the different stains would turn out in comparison to each other. Here's Jean-Claude applying the mixture:

And here's Sofie with her four-row keyboarded instrument:

Then it's back to the garden for another round of drying:

Finally, we'll apply protective wax with a brush:

Coming up next: the endless saga of key-sanding.

At the workshop, odd instruments occasionally show up in the mail for evaluation and repair. Today's postman brought a distant cousin of the nyckelharpa, an instrument called the Hurdy-Gurdy or Vielle à roue in French. Unlike the nyckelharpa, the Hurdy-Gurdy uses a constantly-rotating disc that rubs against drone strings to generate a constant tone.

On the way back from Nancy, driving through the countryside:

After a long couple of days in the violin workshop, it's time to take a side-trip to Nancy, home of the Place Stanislas:

On a stringed instrument, the tailpiece is what provides a solid anchor for the various strings, which are held at high tension. For acoustic reasons, it's important that the tailpiece be anchored to the bottom of the instrument without any kind of glue or permanent attachment. So the piece we'll be carving today will latch on to the bottom of the nyckelharpa and stay there because of the pressure of the stings themselves. The other end, where the three strings attach, splays out into a wider end to hold each of the strings separate. We'll start by forming that wider end:

This mainly involves a whole lot of rasping and filing, to smooth the wood into shape.

A turn on the rotating sander helps us form the decorative end that clamps onto the body:

Next we'll drill a hole for a leather strap to connect the tailpiece to the body, in case it ever comes loose.

Here's the tail of the instrument itself, where we'll be hooking the tailpiece:

We need to shape this so that it has a place for the tailpiece to hang on. We'll use a special Japanese saw:

... and now we have the special cranny, reinforced with a piece of wood over the face that takes the most pressure. We'll set the tailpiece aside for now, until we're done staining and waxing the body itself.

We left off yesterday with the back panel of the instrument clamped to the sides, and the bass resonator and keyboard support clamped to the front panel. After removing all these wooden clamps, we're going to work on sculpting the bass resonator into the right shape. The first thing we'll do is use a pattern to trace the contour of the curve with a pencil:

Then we'll use a small plane to begin sculpting the curve:

Once the basic shape is there, we'll begin to round the wood on the sides:

The resonator is starting to take form:

...and after some sanding, has its final shape:

OK! The two halves of the instrument have been setting all night, and the glue should be dry by now. Time to put the shell on the rotating sander to smooth out the insides of the instrument. This is part of the fiddle's sound-chamber, so it's important that the sides are smooth:

Here's the finished result, showing the glued seam as well:

The next step is to mark and drill the holes for the tuning pegs:

In go the tuning pegs:

Next we'll use a bandsaw to rough out the sound holes in the top board:

The finishing work is done with rasps and files, to round the front edges:

A very time-consuming, but important, part of the shaping of the front sound board is to thin the front of the wood in a very slight incline from the center to the edges, so that the board is thicker in the middle and thinner where it meets the sides. We do this with a plane:

The bass resonator is mounted on the underside of the front panel, hidden from view. It helps shape the sound produced by the instrument. First we'll make sure the side that mates with the inside of the case is absolutely flat:

We'll measure and mark where to glue the bass resonator on the inside of the front panel:

Here's the bass resonator in place, together with the keyboard support on the lower left, which helps bear the weight and pressure of the keys:

How many clamps does it take to hold down the bass resonator and keyboard support?

While that's setting and drying, let's start gluing the back panel on:

Dozens of clamps hold the board in place, while we wipe off excess glue with water:

Tune in tomorrow for more exciting adventures in clamping and gluing!

The instrument on the left above is French luthier Jean-Claude Condi’s modern interpretation of the Moraharpa, a Swedish instrument first attested in the 1300s. A more traditional Moraharpa is on the right.

Let’s step into Jean-Claude’s atelier in Mirecourt, in the French province of Lorraine, to see how long it take to make a modern key fiddle by hand.

We’ll start with this pile of random scrap wood on the floor:

In one of the few concessions to modernity, the keys which press against the strings have been roughly shaped by a computer-aided woodworking tool — but they’ll still need to be finished by hand:

First we’ll trace the exterior outline of the instrument’s template onto the large block of wood:

Then we’ll do a rough cut of the shape, along the pencil-drawn line, with a bandsaw:

After cutting, this nifty rotating sander will make the edges of the instrument nice and smooth:

Now it’s time to plane the surfaces to create an even smoother finish. Very tricky to get the razor-sharp blade to be the exact distance above the surface of the wood. Adjusting this involves hitting one of two metal parts with a hammer.

After the planing, there’s a more extreme step which involves a piece of metal, sharpened to a point on one edge, that acts as a scraper:

Of course, these tools work best on the long, sloping sides of the body, and can’t get very close to the tight corners. So for these areas, we’ll use a chisel to get rid of excess wood:

The “tête,” or head, of the instrument, is much thinner than the rest of the body — it’s about the same size and shape as the head of a guitar. So we’ll need to cut out quite a bit of wood to get there:

This special sanding platform helps us form the tête:

Now for a big step forward: We need to turn this block of wood into a hollow shell that will reverberate with sound. First, we need to put a few holes into the body of the wood, to allow us to turn the band-saw in tight corners:

In order to cut out the inside of the instrument, we’ll take the bandsaw in through the top (We’ll glue this seam back together later.) Then we’ll use one of the holes we drilled to rotate the wood around the vibrating saw blade.

This is just about as nerve-wracking as it looks:

The end result? Happily, a complete instrument shell — and still five fingers on each hand:

Now, to glue the one side together. We’ll put these two screws in, temporarily, on both sides of the instrument, to create a place to wrap string around to hold the two pieces together, like a clamp:

Here goes the glue — animal-based, so it can be removed if necessary later for repairing the instrument:

Now to let the glue set overnight. Coming tomorrow: Four straight hours of rasping!

It's the 19th century...

...versus the 1920s...

...versus 1934:

One Þáttr, many Þættir: shot from a class on Old Norse short stories.

Visiting the burial mounds at Jelling, where an archaeologist talks us through recent excavation discoveries:

The royal mounds and runestones have been an object of study since the 17th century:

Dinner prices in Denmark usually preclude pleasant evenings out, but Sct. Oluf proved to be that most rare of Scandinavian restaurants: good food at reasonable prices.

Along the same principles as Stockholm’s Skansen, Den Gamle By is an outdoor museum with buildings taken from the surrounding area and placed in a reconstituted setting.

After Shanghai, a few days on the West Coast before heading off to the Jutlandic peninsula for a summer course: Paganism and Christianity in Old Norse Textual Studies.