Review: Archguitar Anyone?

Subject: Review: Archguitar Anyone?
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 24 Dec 08 - 03:05 AM

The other day I remembered a CD I picked up at Plan Nine in Charlottesville yonks ago. Lovely to have just running in the background. So soothing.

So did a search on the instrument played in the CD.

The archguitar is a modern instrument designed by Peter Blanchette and Walter Stanul in 1980. Archguitars can have from 9 to 11 strings, giving them a much larger musical range than 6-string guitars. Most of Blanchette's recordings are of baroque, renaissance and modern classical music, though the instrument lends itself well to all acoustic styles.

www.archguitar.com

Must find that CD.

Subject: RE: Review: Archguitar Anyone?
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 24 Dec 08 - 03:45 AM

I have a long playing record from the 1970s of Narciso Yepes playing Bach on a 10 string guitar, sleeve notes say it was originally recorded on a 14 string guitar, so Archguitar dosen't seem all that new.

eric

Subject: RE: Review: Archguitar Anyone?
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 10:26 AM

refresh

Subject: RE: Review: Archguitar Anyone?
From: kendall
Date: 27 Dec 08 - 10:48 AM

Lenny Breau used to play jazz on a 7 string classical guitar. He was so great, what a loss.

Subject: RE: Review: Archguitar Anyone?
From: Ross Campbell
Date: 28 Dec 08 - 06:35 AM

Arch-lutes and arch-citterns were common (relatively) several hundred years ago - there are quite a few examples in the Victoria & Albert Museum's Musical Instrument Collection. Later guitar-based versions of these instruments appeared. I'm sure I saw one in Sydney Evans (Tonewood Suppliers) in Birmingham UK in the mid-seventies. That instrument probably dated from the twenties or thirties. I bought a copy of Franz Jahnel's "Die Gitarre und ihr Bau" on that visit, and I was almost certain the book includeed plans for an arch-guitar, but I can't find my copy at the moment, and Google-Books' on-line copy of the index doesn't show it up. I'll keep looking. Anyway, the concept is much older than the 1980s.

Strawhead's Gregg Butler made himself a kind of arch-cittern in the seventies, but he found tuning a great problem, so the instrument never made many public appearances. I think Roger Bucknall (Fylde Guitars) recently made him a more usable version of the instrument.

Ross