Tin can what?

Standard practice among professional bodhrán players is to wrap the rim of the instrument with black electrical tape. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the antiquity of that practice. But then, another standard of Irish music is the penny whistle, and Robert Clark of Manchester didn't start rolling them out of tin plate until 1840. (To be fair, fipple flutes are documented far earlier than that in the isles...back through tabor pipe and flagolet and eventually to what appears to be a bone flute discovered in a neanderthal grave.)

The earliest documentation of the gue in the Shetlands is also in the mid nineteenth century. The presumed ancestor(s) are attested to no earlier than the fifteenth century. But, again, the concept of the bowed lyre goes way, way back. So it isn't terribly presumptuous to assume something like the gue or a two-string talgaharpa -- as well as a frame drum somewhat resembling the bodhrán in shape and material if not in performance practice -- was in use by the Norse of the Viking era.

Not that I care overmuch. I'm composing a piece around my new gue, and I'll use whatever instruments sound good with it.

On reflection going for a worn, found-in-the-attic look for the gue was unsatisfying. Several people have expressed disappointment that I didn't chose to sand it down fine and give it a nice glossy coat of urethane. In all honesty, I would have had to spend a lot longer building it in the first place in order for it to stand up to that kind of detailing. In any case I still took it back to the shop and gave it another coat of polish.

Basically everything worked. It is also kinda neat that I made my own strings, meaning the only parts in it that were designed by someone else as part of a musical instrument are the pegs (and I could have carved my own.) I've been messing around with tuning to various pitches and shifting the position of the bridge. There's a fairly narrow zone of pitches where they work well on the string (not too tight, not too slack) and still sound good on the sound board. Similar constraints on the bridge placement; towards the sound hole improves the melody string at the cost of unbalancing the blend with the drone, but too far stretches the scale length until the fourth finger is no longer a comfortable reach.

The biggest problems are that the strings are a little too far apart to make it comfortable to finger both simultaneously, and the heel is awkward to clamp between the legs (as is not just standard practice, but the best position I've found so far). I've also changed to a reverse grip on the bow; jouhikko practice is apparently to use the forefinger to tension the bow string but I'm disliking the groove that puts in your finger and using the thumb works better for me.

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Cherry did not work well for me on my first experiment with making a frame drum. I had some strips of 1/16" veneer so I soaked it and applied a heat gun used for stripping paint. It didn't bend nicely. Most of my sources lean towards dry bending, but in any case the hot pipe bending tool seems clearly superior. Fortunately one can be made with as little as a tin can and a light bulb.

There also seems to be a nearly even split between negative and positive forms. I found it a pain to shove strips of wood into a hole so next time I'll try wrapping them around a disk. But, really, I've been doing too many personal projects at work and not putting enough hours on the time card. Spent eight hours in the shop this Saturday and only four of them go on the clock.

(It also seemed to wear me out to where I never quite got it together today to go out and shoot some video. I'm anxious now to shoot the footage for Uncharted Worlds so I can go and retune the instruments from that back to either standard tuning or the Dorian mode I'm thinking of for the new piece.)

I am rather wanting a smaller, higher pitched hand drum for the new piece. That's the second reason to eventually find the time to build it (the primary reason is to learn how to bend wood). Also means buying a goat skin at some point. Oh, and the standard decoration for a bodhrán after the skin is glued down is upholstery tacks and a ribbon. Which would be a natural application for my card loom. Which I have yet to learn how to use. Which also might be short of cards to make a wide enough strip. Which would be nicest if I had a laser to run a few more off to the pattern I already have. Did I mention TheShop is closed for relocation, no other information forthcoming?

And so it goes. At least in the interim I can practice the gue. The Kreisler highway is narrow indeed on that instrument, and the zone where bow speed and pressure and tension (remember, you can adjust bow tension on the fly with a taglaharpa style bow) is equally narrow. Plus of course this is a fretless instrument, meaning muscle memory alone for where all the notes are.