I’m working on a new edition of “Candyshop,” and one of the features that I wanted to have was a giant rosette ring that spilled over the sides of the psaltery’s soundboard.
First, I had to cut out a giant disc. In this case, I used some musk burl veneer that had been laminated to another layer of burl veneer for stiffness and strength. The burl disc pictured to the left is about 7″ in diameter!
From there, I just had to cut a second hole on the inside to form a “doughnut” shape with the burl veneer. I was also planning on using a spare (non-standard) laser-cut rose pattern that I had on hand that sort of resembles a flower.
You can see a loose layout of both the giant rosette ring, and the rose on top of the Sitka Spruce soundboard. Note how the rosette ring hangs off the side of the soundboard: once the binding is in place, it will only be a partial circle.
I also later added some Purpleheart and Pink Ivory wooden dots in the wide open are between the rose and the edge of the rosette ring. (I don’t have a picture of this yet…)
Here’s some picture of a custom psaltery that I recently completed.
The top is Curly Redwood, with a laser-cut Padauk rose and a Curly Maple rosette ring. The binding and bridge are also made of Curly Maple. I love the look of curly woods: it almost reminds me of draped fabric, and seems to beg you to reach out and touch it to see if it’s really flat.
This psaltery also has black pins, and phosphor bronze wound strings.
For the back/sides, African Wenge was used, which is a very dark, elegant, (and resonant) wood.
This psaltey also features a herringbone backstrip, a tripod mount insert, and a rear soundhole.
The backstrip blends in very well with the Wenge, and almost makes it look as if the psaltery could be unzipped.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m in the process of developing a 3-octave psaltery. After crunching the numbers in a spreadsheet, and drawing up the plans in CAD, I was just about ready to go…
Except I’d never gone this low before: that is, I’d never strung a psaltery to be played as low as the instrument that I was proposing. (I’m planning to have the 3-octave model start on G2, a full octave lower than my current model.)
So, I made a test-model. It wasn’t rocket science. I just took a big slab of some Ash (or was it Elm?) that had been collected from my yard, and popped a couple of tuning pins in each side. After adding a basic bridge and a wound string, I was ready to start testing the string lengths, tension, and tone.
The main reason for this sidetrack is that I would imagine it would be a real drag to build, drill, and string an entire 35″ long psaltery, only to have the lowest strings sound bad because I didn’t double check to see if all the stringing “rules” that I’d discovered through trial and error on my smaller psalteries were still valid on a larger scale.
So far, so good.
I was going through some of my old notes and drawings, and I laughed at some of my early thoughts. Some ideas were good, and turned out really well. Some ideas were, well, not so good. (Like experimenting with glass soundboards…)
One feature that stood out quite early was the actual shape of the psaltery;s body. It may come as a surprise to some that I struggled on this, going back and forth between a simple triangle (as the psaltery seen on A Psimple Psaltery), and the five-sided shape that I now use pretty much exclusively today. But back then, it wasn’t so clear.
Early drawing of a 3-sided model
Here’s one such drawing that I made back in 2006. It’s simple, but the fact that I went to this trouble at all shows that I was seriously considering the plan.
In retrospect, I’m glad that I’ve stuck with the design that I’m currently using.
First, I had to cut out a giant disc. In this case, I used some musk burl veneer that had been laminated to another layer of burl veneer for stiffness and strength. The burl disc pictured to the left is about 7″ in diameter!
You can see a loose layout of both the giant rosette ring, and the rose on top of the Sitka Spruce soundboard. Note how the rosette ring hangs off the side of the soundboard: once the binding is in place, it will only be a partial circle.
