I've always been attracted to the unusual and people who plough their own furrows rather than following the mainstream. Since reading Gregg Miner's wonderfull article on Harp Ukuleles I wanted to build one of my own with "a tip of the hat" to Christopher Knutsen's creations, but not a copy - one in my own style. So I decided to make one using "bits and pieces" from around the workshop. The instrument is called Ferdinand as it's an arch-uke (that's a First World War European joke
)I decided on a multi-scale instrument based around a tenor ukulele scale and chose 424mm for the treble scale, 445mm for the bass scale with 13 frets clear of the body and based around my travel guitar body size. I wanted to make the bracing "interesting" so decided on a Taropatch with four sub-bass strings so that I could use mandolin tuners for the main neck and half a set for the hollow arm. The top was a £5 European Spruce mandolin top covered in bearclaw that I had joined and "rosetted" and then forgotten about in the workshop. The back, sides, neck and hollow arm peghead are sapele offcuts from a door frame being thrown out by a local architectural woodworking firm a few years ago. and the peghead veneers are East Indian Rosewood off-cuts. The fingerboard is a scrap of nice Macassar ebony and the bridge is English Walnut. The hollow arm is "joined" to the body on the front using an EIR strip, and to make it look "planned" rather than make-do, I curved the edges and cut an elliptical sound hole there. The binding is curly koa, and curly narra on the fingerboard. The tuners are Gotoh mandolin. The main neck is strung with Aquila nylgut Low G Tenor ukulele strings, and the sub-basses are D'Addario Classical guitar strings - 6th, 5th, 5th and 4th. I have the instrument in G C E F GG CC DD GG tuning.
Here's some pictures:
and I apologise for the one of ugly me holding it to show the size:
Here's the top bracing:
and the back bracing and spruce flying buttress braces. The top and back braces were all radiused to 10':
Well I'd forgotten just how hard Harp guitars are to play - working out where the sub-bass strings are and how to find them and then play them in time will take me a long time. I got some practice this weekend playing with my guitar buddy Bill Briscombe so here's a shot at a recording. There are two tracks on the Jukebox on the sounds page of my website. Click on the Jukebox icon and then scroll down to the last two tracks (38 & 39) and click on the track you want to play. Track 38 is just me playing each string in turn to demonstrate the tuning : G C E F GG CC DD GG. Track 39 is two pieces - the first is "The Waffen Waltz" written by Chris Wood and taught to me at Burwell by Ed Boyd, and this is followed by a piece of my own that "emerged" from Ferdinand over the last week (no title yet). This gives an idea of picking and strumming and using all of the strings. It's my usual recording setup - a single AKG C1000S microphone into a Fostex FD4, mixed down with flat EQ and no effects. I'm really pleased with the harp like sound and it holds it's own played in a duet with guitar.
Thanks for looking and listening.
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