THE CITOLE PROJECT

This page represents my continuing interest in medieval stringed instruments. I do a fair amount of singing, and was looking for a period instrument to accompany myself on. I already have a harp (a nice gothic bray harp made by George Stevens), and have been using my vaguely period looking mandolin as a strummed instrument. But I wanted something more authentic, and I don't play lute (or particularly have an interest - quite difficult to play, not loud enough for the majority of venues I play in, and very difficult to make). So casting about I learned about a popular early instrument called a citole. This page documents my research inquiry into the instrument, and my efforts to construct an elaborately decorated one.

BASIC HISTORY:
The citole appears in Europe somewhere around the end of the 12th century. It seems to have evolved slowly from the classical and late antiquity period instrument called the cithara, which was a kind of lyre. The increasing demand of monophonic music to have more elaborate note structures, and the influence of the older lutes forms of the east, appears to have created a fingerboard on the cithara (see illustrations below). Slowly the fingerboard made the side supports redundant, and the they shrank away into simple curls or juts to the side at the base of the neck. The citole was born.

Or was it? There is a great deal of confusion over exactly which instrument portrayed goes with what name. In the early 12th century, two instrument names appear - the gittern, and the citole. Both seem to be somewhat indescriminently applied to similar instruments, and various scholars have attempted (including Mary Remnant and Lawrence Wright) to separate out the two instruments. I shall report both their findings, the thoughts that preceded them, and my own musings on the subject.

The term cithara is where it begins. Cithara was the generic name for a class of instruments similar, but not the same as, the lyre, ostensibly deriving from the Greek island Cithara. The first instruments in southern Europe with vertical, incurved sides and a flat back were referred to as citharas. Cithara became Cithar, and a large cithar became a Citarrone, or Chitarrone/Chitarra. By the thirteenth century this instrument was the Chitera, Chiterna, Quinterna in Spanish and Italian, whilst in the French it gets the "g" and becomes guiterne or gitterne. The English name, gittern, geterne, gyttren (even gythorn) comes from the French, and gets applied somewhat haphazardly to any flat backed plucked instrument (as distinguished from the Guitare Moresque with its round back and the family of the lute that derives from it). The citole is alternately known as sytholle, sitole, cythol, cytol. Cerone, a 16th century Spanish writer, claimed that the citola was identical with the cetera, the cither, or the cittern. Bishop Oresme of Lisieux writes in the 14th century that "cithare est cithole" - the cithara is the citole. Galpin postulates that the original form was citharola, "little cither" which engendered the Provencal "cithola". The supposition that BOTH terms arose out of the same word, cithara, complicates the issue. So both citole and gittern owe their origins to the cithara, or it would appear.

THE CITOLE AND GITTERN IN THE LITERATURE
The citole makes its appearance late in the 12th century, and seems wildly popular throughout the 13th and well into the 14th century. It fades toward the end of the 14th save in some romances, and in the 15th starts disappearing from the literature altogether.

It appears in texts of the 12th century - Daurel et Beton (written in later 12th cent.) has a hero who could "play the citole, and harp richly, and sing songs and compose by himself". Erec et Enide (by Chretien de Troyes in 1164) also has his hero similarly skilled. Guiraut de Calanson in his work from 1210 called "Conseils aux Jongler" offered that the Jongler must know the pipe and tabor, the citole, the symphony (hurdy-gurdy), the mandore, the manichord, the 17-string rote, the harp, the gigue, and the 10-string psaltery. Thus the citole is set as a primary instrument of the jonglers and troubadours of its time.

Documentary evidence has it appearing in the 13th Century History of Fulke Fitzwarine. The Role de la Taille, a list of tradespeople in Paris from 1292, lists four citoleeurs. Giles li Muisis in roughly 1300 comments on Parisian students making merry with citoles. There are a number of mentions of it in 13th century Spain; including a citoler in the court of Alfonso the Wise (1252-1284), named Lourenco (from Portugal) involved in a court case where a knight, apparantly unhappy with the music, smashed his citole over his head. The citole is even associated with dance music in several literary references in Spain. It appeared heavily favored in England, by the number of players hired by courts there, including William le Citolur in 1269; Janyn the Citoler who was paid one mark for performing at the Westminster Festivities of 1305 (where Edward I was knighted); Ivo Vala for citole playing in 1312-1334; William Sitolir in 1332; Robertus le Cetoler 1339; John Sitoler in 1412). Ed III's court band had a "cyteler".

The 14th Century sees a boom in romance references to it; Launfal, Lybeaus Desconus, and The Squyr of Lowe Degre all having cytolers in their midst.

From Sir Launfal (Thomas Chestre Breton Lay - 14th Century)
"To daunce they wente, alle in same:
To se hem play, hit was fair game,
A lady and a knight.
They hadde menstrales of moch honours,
Fidelers, sitoles, and trompours,
And elles hit were unright;
Ther they playde, forsothe to say,
After mete, the someres day
All what hit was neigh night."

In Adam Davie's "Life of Alexander" from the 14th century, we read "At the feste was trumping,/ Piping and eke taborying,/ Sytolyng and eke harpyng."

From "The Pearl" (Pearl Poet, 14th century), Canto II:3
"Fowls there flew thru the forest in flocks,
Of flamboyant hues, both small and great;
But citole string and gittern player (note BOTH are listed here)
Their reckless mirth cannot repeat,
For when these birds their wings did beat-
They sang so, with a sweet assent.
More gracious glee could no one get
Than to hear and see this adornment."

From Sir Cleges (Middle English Breton Lay)
"And as he walkyd uppe and done
Sore sygheng, he herd a sowne
Off dyverse mynstralsy,
Off trumpers, pypers, and nakerners,
Off herpers notys and gytherners,
Off sytall and of sautrey. (this alliterative phrase seemed popular in a number of places)
Many carrals and grete dansyng
In every syde herd he syng,
In every place, treuly.
He wrong hys hondes and wepyd sore;
Mekyll mon he made ther,
Sygheng full pytewysly."

From Confessio Amantis "Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins" - Incipit Liber Octavus: Part 1
"He tawhte hir til sche was certein
Of Harpe, of Citole and of Rote,
With many a tun and many a note
Upon Musique, upon mesure,
And of hire Harpe the temprure
He tawhte hire ek, as he wel couthe."

In later 14th century the references are fewer, and by Chaucer, the citole is noted as being of the Knights Tale, ie, already archaic.
"The form of Venus, glorious as could be,
Was naked, Floating on the open sea,
And from the navel down all covered was
With green waves, bright as ever any glass.
A citole in her small right hand had she,
And on her head, and beautiful to see,
A garland of red roses, sweet smelling..."
Though of course, it could be a Chaucerian notion that Venus had the cithara, not the citole.

A stock phrase of the alliterative poetry survives with "Citole and psaltery" in various forms such as from Richard Holland's Buke of the Howlate (ca. 1450):
"The psaltery, the sytholis, the soft sytharist,
The croude and the monycordis, the gittrynis gay;
The rote, and the recordour, the rivupe, the rist,
The trumpe and the talburn, the tympane but tray"

There is still a citoler at the court of Navarre, Arnaut Guillem de Hursua, juglar de citola, who received payments in 1412 and 1413. Tinctoris gives us a very nice description in his "De Inventione et Usu Musicae" (c.1487); "Yet another derivative of the lyra is the instrument called cetula by the Italians, who invented it. It has four brass or steel strings usually tuned, a tone, a fourth, and back a tone, and its is played with a plectum. Since the cetula is flat, it is fitted with certain certain wooden elevations on the neck, arranged proportionately, and known as frets. The strings are pressed against these by the fingers to make a higher or lower note." But Tinctoris also states that by the late 15th century, "the cetula is only used in Italy by rustics to accompany light songs and to lead dance music." There is perhaps a question whether the instrument he is describing is already heading toward the cittern - the wire stringing, and the re-entrant tuning are both characteristic of the Renaissance cittern (of which much information on tuning and stringing is available), and he may instead be describing an instrument in transition. The cittern was popular both with nobles and with lower classes, and was kind of the bar-room guitar of Renaissance England.

The "rustics" in England put on plays, and in the 15th century Cornish miracle play Ordinale de Origine Mundi, King David speaks:
Wethong menstels ha tabours
trey-hans harps ha trompours
cythol crowd fylh ha savtry
psalmus gyttrens ha nakrys
organs in weth cymbalys
recordys ha symphony.

Translation - [Blow minstrels and tabors/Three hundred harps and trumpets/Citoles, crowd, fiddle and psaltery/Shawms, gitterns and nakers/Organs, also cymbals/Recorders and symphony.]

But after the 15th century the instrument seems to vanish from the mind. The common belief is that it morphed slowly into the Cittern, and thus the name citole is merely replaced.

Thus the citole starts out as a jongleur and troubadour instrument in the 12th century, sees a brief but spectacular favor in the 13th and 14th, amongst the courts and in the heroic romances that entertained them, and then seems to slowly fade away into a has-been instrument by the 15th century, replaced by its successor, the cittern.

References to gittern players can be found from 1306 in England to Italian players of 1460's and 1470's. Particularly in the 14th century and early fifteenth, they appear in vogue, especially in the courts. Charles V inventory in 1373 includes four, including one of ivory. Court of Este and the court of Ferrara include hiring information of master players, and the Duke Leonello d'Este purchased one for himself in 1445. Dante describing round back of gittern: "...just as it would be blameworthy operation to make a spade of a fine sword or a goblet of a fine gittern..." Jean Gerson, in French sermon of 1400, compares the four cardinal virtues to "la guiterne de quatre cordes". Chaucer mentions the instrument as that one used by the parish clerk to serenade the carpenter's wife "The moone, whan it was night, ful brighte shoon/ And Absolon his Giterne hath i-take". It also shows up in Piers Plowman: "Ich can not tabre, no trompe, ne telle faire gestes, / Ne fithelyn at gestes, ne harpen,/ Japen ne jagelyn, ne gentilische pipe,/ Nother sailen, ne sautrien, ne singe with the giterne." Tinctoris describes the gittern as "it is very obvious that the instrument invented by the Catalans, which some call the ghiterra and others the ghiterna, is descended from the lute; for it has the same tortoise-shell shape, tuning and method of playing as the lute, though it is much smaller." Tuning thus would be 4th/3rd/4th. But like with the citole, Tinctoris obverses in Ferrera "the ghiterra is used most rarely, because of the thinness of its sound. When I heard it in Catalonia, it was being used much more often by women, to accompany love-songs, than by men." He already saw the instrument in decline, replaced by the lute and up and coming guitarras. But it was far from dead. Henry VIII in the tallies of his possessions at his death had listed "four gitterons called Spanish Vialles." Don Luys Milan of Valencia in 1536 distinguishes the Gittern from the Spanish gittern or "vihuela" as the latter having six strings, and the former having four. Michael Praetorius as late as 1618 still provides a tuning for the instrument at d' a f c or g' d bb f, with the actual pitch varying with size of the instrument. However, these references to Gittern may instead be to the four course "guitar" rather than an actual gittern.

Like the citole, the instrument seems to have had a hey-day of the 13th-14th centuries, but went into decline after that.

MORPHOLOGY IN REPRESENTATION: WHAT DOES A CITOLE LOOK LIKE?

The image on the left is from the Bible of Charles the Bald from the 9th century -the one on the right, from the Utrecht Psalter, Psalm 43, also from the 9th century. These show the cithara in transition to the new form of instrument. The left shows the cithara/lyra having acquired a fingerboard, though the arms still support the top crossbar, even if ornamentally. The figure from Utrecht shows the neck now free of the arms, but the vestages of the arms still present in the broad curls at the top of the body of the instrument where it joins the neck. It is from instruments like these of the 9th century that the citole/gittern develops.

Chronologically, our next representation of the instrument is this sculpture by Benedetto Antelami, ca.1180, from the Baptistry in Parma, Italy. It shows an instrument with four distinct strings, a bridge, definite raised frets, and small wings at the top of the body. The strings run to an endpeg or piece. Unclear in these pictures is the small rosette shallowly carved into the soundboard. We cannot see the back of the instrument, but it appears to be flat, as it is very close to the body. The player uses a plectum, a fairly heavy arrow shaped one (as opposed to the light quill plectums also of the period). This instrument appears to be the direct precursor of the citole/gittern. Most individuals seem to classify it as a citole, and it is the instrument copied by modern reproductions that call themselves "citoles," including the instruments by Bernard Ellis and by Ancestral Instruments.

Then, of course, we hit the high period of the instrument in the 13th century, and the images are more numerous, but also more problematic. Take for example this set of images from the Cantigas da Santa Maria, from 13th century Spain:

Here we have four pairs of instruments portrayed, numbered left to right, top to bottom, 1-4. The lower two obviously contain a bowed vielle (images 3,4). But textually (in the romance descriptions) the citole was often paired with the fiddle. Three images (1, 3, 4) have the plucked instruments with four strings, while a single (2) has both sickle shaped instruments as having three strings (indeed, they look very much like plucked rebecs). The left hand instrument in 1 and the right hand instrument in 3 are very close in shape and structure, both having the "holly leaf shape", a decided fingerboard with frets, a bridge of some kind. Number 1's however has a fixed bridge, and no tailpiece, whereas an end-nut is visible (if not the tailpiece) in number 3. The instruments in 2 and 4 both have sickle shaped pegboxes, but the 2 image has no fingerboard, is pear shaped and has three strings, when the one in four has a fingerboard, four strings, and a more rounded body, similar to the right hand instrument in 1. I believe what we have here is the instrument breaking up into its component types. Numbers 1(left) and 3 are citoles - they seem to retain the characteristic wings, frets and body shape of the earlier form. Whereas 1(right),2,4 are probably gitterns, as they seem to fit the later descriptions of the instrument as having a rounded body shape. (though I'm still tempted to call 2 a rebec, as it was sometimes played by plucking rather than bowing).

The left image is from Lincoln Cathedral, dating around 1270. The right is from Strasbourg Cathedral, the west portal, and dates from the 13th cent. Both show what are commonly referred to as BOTH gitterns and citoles. The Strasbourg sculpture shows the characteristic wings, end trefoil endpeg, and four strings of the citole like instrument. It also appears to have a flat back. The Lincoln image also has four strings, a tailpiece, a bridge, and is plucked by the arrow shaped plectum. However, the Strasbourg pegbox is sickle shaped, and the Lincoln image lacks a fingerboard with frets. The Strasbourg sculpture I'd categorize as similar enough to the citole to allow it to be so classified. The Lincoln image is tougher, as the defining wing structures are missing, and the instrument almost looked like a plucked fiddle. Wright claims it for the citole camp - though I am not quite as sure as he is.

The left image is a sculpture from the Minstrels' Gallery in Exeter Cathedral, ca 1300. The right is the Coronation of the Virgin from The De Lisle Psalter, English c.1310. Both show a citole. The Exeter sculpture shows a strong resemblence to the Parma image, with four strings, flat body, tailpiece, rosette, bridge, fretted fingerboard. The wing structures are missing, but this somehow seems less disturbing here. The right figure is definitely our winged culprit - all the details fall together - the fingerboard with frets, four strings, wings, rosette, arrow plectum, tailpeg in trefoil. Only now this odd neck has developed, that is deep with a cut-out hole for the thumb. It is definitely the cittern in the making (see below), but seems a strange step here. Nonetheless, definitely a citole.

This interesting image I photographed at the Yorkshire Museum in York, England. It is a bit of the original late 13th century stained glass that survives from the ruin of St. Mary's Abbey at the same location (apparantly Henry VIII destroyed the abbey, and only ruins now remain, which they very interestingly built the museum around). This actually caught my wife's eye before mine, but it is truly intriguing as it literally is "holly leaf" shaped - with four points on the body on both sides. Though hard to make out in this image (the photo was a little difficult, as the roundelle was only about 8-10 inches across and backlit in a dark room) there were four strings on the body, but six pegs in the head. The instrument does have a tailpiece, but if there is a trefoil or quatrefoil at the end, it cannot be made out. There are no frets drawn. There is a large plectum, though it looks to me more like a stripped quill plectum than the heavy arrow-shaped ones in other images. Still, I definitely would have to class this instrument as a citole, if something of an outlyer in exact morphology.

Stained glass window from Lincoln Cathedral, listed as probably 14th century. I don't know if this is original or restored glass. The instrument here is a wonderfully clear representation of a citole that looks almost like a picture of the Warwick Castle gittern below. Has the traditional body with trefoil leaf tail and wings, clearly fretted fingerboard, large thick neck with hole piercing it for the thumb, and a happy little dragon head at the termination of the pegbox.. Potentially interesting features are the number of strings, which appears to be six double courses (six strings are shown going across the instrument, though the pegbox has twelve pegs) instead of a more standard four. The other very interesting feature (and of possible relevance to the Warwick citole) is the lack of a tailpiece. Instead, it looks like a fixed bridge (like you would see on a lute or a modern guitar). Could be artists error, as the fixed bridge does get awfully close to the tail, but the width of the scalloped piece is suggestive of a true fixed bridge.

This interesting image I photographed at the Yorkshire Museum in York, England. It is a bit of the original late 13th century stained glass that survives from the ruin of St. Mary's Abbey at the same location (apparantly Henry VIII destroyed the abbey, and only ruins now remain, which they very interestingly built the museum around). This actually caught my wife's eye before mine, but it is truly intriguing as it literally is "holly leaf" shaped - with four points on the body on both sides. Though hard to make out in this image (the photo was a little difficult, as the roundelle was only about 8-10 inches across and backlit in a dark room) there were four strings on the body, but six pegs in the head. The instrument does have a tailpiece, but if there is a trefoil or quatrefoil at the end, it cannot be made out. There are no frets drawn. There is a large plectum, though it looks to me more like a stripped quill plectum than the heavy arrow-shaped ones in other images. Still, I definitely would have to class this instrument as a citole, if something of an outlyer in exact morphology.

These two images show problems with the citole line. Left is the Ormesby Psalter, 14th Cent. from Bodleian Library in Oxford. Right is "An armed man seeking pleasure with various instruments of music" Dutch astrological treatise at the British Library, early 14th Century. The right image has four strings, like the citole/gittern. However the sickle pegbox, and pearshaped body harken back to the three stringed instruments from the Cantigas. This is NOT a citole, though it is where the gittern, with its bowl back and four strings is headed. The left image harkens back to the Lincoln cathedral image, which vaguely resembled the plucked fiddle. This too has fretted fingerboard, tailpiece, four strings, and arrow plectum. The neck also curves back sharply and thickly, hinting at the deep neck from the de Lisle Psalter image. It shows a kind of continuity between them both, and seems to link those trends in the unfixed morphology of the instrument.

Image from a 14th Century French Book of Hours. This is actually the image from which I took the border pattern for the sides of my recreation (see below). I later noticed that it actually contained a pair of citoles in the image, which I found rather amusing, so I added it here. The two angels on the top left and right are both portrayed as playing standard design citoles. Rounded back region with tail (here reduced to a ball-like extension), short wings, tailpiece, etc. The one on the left is portrayed with four strings, the one on the right with three (hard to make out in picture, I realize), which I ascribe to artist ease. Again, note the pairing with psaltery and fiddles, as was common in the literature.

In the 14th century, we might be able to determine the Citole form from GLOSSED ILLUSTRATIONS. First is from 14th century Brussels MS. Folio 39 has a gloss to the word lira saying "Lira est quoddam genus cithare vel est sitola alioquin deficeret hic instrumentum illud multum vulgare" - "Lira is a certain kind of cithara or is a citole; otherwise that very common instrument would be lacking here". Below it is a drawing of a four stringed instrument with a holy-leafed shaped body ending in a trefoil. It has a fingerboard extending onto the belly, and an arrow shaped plectum attached by a cord to the neck of the instrument. It also displays that strange heavy outcurved neck, so would seem to be consistant with the images that are its contemporaries. From that, we can generally assume that what we've identified as citoles so far are so.

A Paris MS of the 14th century is badly damaged, but under ultraviolet light shows an instrument entitled a "chitarra" - ch/c often confused, according to this author. This shows a "winged" holy-shaped instrument with four strings, a fretted fingerboard, a bridge and and endpeg. I've noted that as "CITOLE" in modern type. Another instrument farther up the page shows a sickle-shaped pegbox on a rounded backed instrument called a "gittern," thereof showing this was what the gittern then looked like. I've noted that as "GITTERN" in modern type. The instruments seem to strongly conform with the models shown in the images above. The gittern definitely seems to be developing the rounded body with the sickle head, and the citole the winged body with simple head, but odd neck.

Strangely, a single surviving instrument comes from this period. The original body dates from 1330, but which was converted to a violin in the 16th Century (when it was presented to the Earl of Leicester by Queen Elizabeth I, no less). The soundboard and bridge are 16th century modifications, but the unibody and neck are from the 14th century. It is now known as the Warwick Castle Gittern, just to be confusing, as it appears instead to be a model citole! Note the large open neck, the trefoil endpiece, and flattened back. It is considered a true treasure of the middle ages, and presently resides in the British Museum in the hall of Medieval treasures, just around the corner from Sutton Hoo and just next to the Isle of Man chess pieces. The first image shows the instrument as it was originally found. The second image is a cast of the original, with an attempt to remove the violin elements and see what the original morphology might have been. The remaining three images (in color) are pictures I took of it on display at the British Museum. The carving is absolutely amazing, and the end dragon is especially fun. I included the closs-up of the neck so that some of the detail could be made out. The fact that the corner is clipped where the neck joins with the soundboard suggests that the sides of the body were originally a little higher, and that the rounding of the soundboard might have occurred when it was converted to a violin (which has a rounded soundboard) rather than an original flatter soundboard.

The latest sculpture that might be of the form of the instrument appears to be the sculpture from the nave of Beverley Minster, early 15th century, As seen here. It harkens back again to the Parma Baptistry image with its simplicity, but lacks all the secondary shapes we have seen, including the wings, neck, etc. I would say this instrument is either a proto-lute, or an archaic attempt at one of the earlier instruments. It does not strike me as a citole, especially given the extreme form which it had reached by this point in time.

By this time, instead (the 15th century, that is), it has already started moving toward the cittern, which it becomes by the end of the century.

The citole is definite ancestor of the cittern. Thus aspects of the cittern can be backtracked into the citole. Lawrence Wright postulates this drawn progression. The heavy filled in neck with thumb hole of the earlier versions such as in the Warwick "gittern" lengthened into a slot (such as in the carving in Rheims Cathedral) and finally opens out, leaving a gap at the body end of the loop as in the Ormesby Psalter instrument. The resulting long hanger slowly shrinks until it becomes the traditional hook on the back of the head of the cittern. This combined with the common belief, within the period in question, that the citole was the origin of the cittern, point heavily in that direction. The cittern even has vestigal "wings" still left as small scrolls at the corners of the top of the body. See the image below.

Thus, this last image, from the Queen Mary Psalter, shows the instrument in its most ideal form. Flat body, fretted fingerboard, with wooden frets (or bone, etc.); four strings of metal (per Tinct.); a holy-leaf shaped body with slight waist, winged projections at the top of the body, and a small trefoil at the the end tip. All plucked with a arrow shaped plectum of bone or wood, sometimes of an elaborate design.

ISSUE OF STRINGS AND TUNING
Possibly the most complicated issue in old instruments is what they were strung with and how they were tuned. Very few sources of information exist on the exact materials that any given instrument was strung with, and even when we do have sometimes very detailed descriptions of the instrument, we don't get much info by way of how it was tuned.

On the strings, modern reconstructions of the instrument have been done with both wire (silver, bronze) strings and with gut (usually sheep's gut, though ram, pig, and calf all show up in the medieval descriptions of "how to make gut"). The question of choice between these two comes down to two arguments. For metal strings, the lyre like instruments that preceeded the citole and from which it developed were metal strung, as were the citterns that descended from it. Continuity would suggest that the citole was metal strung. The heavy plectum depicted, along with the description of bone or wood frets would also suggest metal strings (heavy plectum not damaged by sharper strings, and tied gut frets not cut by them). Tinctoris' description above from "De Inventione et Usu Musicae" from 1487 speaks of four metal strings. The lateness of his date, however, makes it a harder to guess if it was always strung so - he is speaking of an instrument that he considers archaic at his time, but at a time when the metal strung cittern is already appearing (the re-entrant tuning he suggests for his cetula is more reminiscent of a renaissance cittern than a medieval instrument). However, generally speaking, the only instruments ever described as being metal strung in the middle ages are harps (including lyres, cithara, and the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh harps) and psalteries. All the lute-like instruments, including the proto-lutes, fiddles, etc., are all specifically described as being gut strung, with tied gut frets (or no frets). There is one specific reference made by Jean de Brie in his Le Bon Berger of 1379, a little closer in time to the heyday of the citole, which states that gut strings are best for "vielles, harpes, rothes, luthz, quiternes, rebecs, choros, almaduries, symphonies, cytholes, and other instruments that one makes to give sound by means of the fingers and of strings." This sweeping statement is the only direct mention of with what a citole might be strung during the time of its use, and almost, because of its broad encompas, may not be trusted (for example, there were wire strung harps and rothes, though not in the geographic region where he lived). But given that this is the only evidence that we have, I think that we are stuck with a situation that could go either way. For my reconstruction, I am chosing to go the way of gut, partially because I think it is probably more accurate to an earlier period instrument, and partially because its the sound I want from the instrument.

On tuning, we have two authors that give up potential hints. The anonymous author of the 14th Century Summa Musicae notes that fingerboard stringed instruments "are tuned in the consonances of octave, fourth and fifth, and that by putting down their fingers the players of these make tones and semitones for themselves." Thus we might see the instrument tuned in alternating 4th and 5ths, or in 5ths, or in octaves, such as g d g' d' or as d a d' g. This produces easy drone style chording that was popular at the time. Jerome of Moravia, writing in the late 13th century, discusses a similar style of tuning for fiddles, and he provides several tuning options for the 5-string fiddle using very similar structuring. Given this, an "open tuning" for the citole - something like the g d g' d' - would be appropriate, as opposed to a mandolin like tuning (or violin like) of g d a' e'. We also know that it was fairly commonplace to retune the instrument into the key and structure of individual songs, so a specific fixed tuning isn't truly necessary, but this at least gives us a point of reference.

MY RECREATION
So, gathering from all the variations above, we can compile a sort of summary of forms that I can work from to do my recreation of the instrument.

The consistant elements of the instrument appear to be the fretted neck, a central rosette, a tailpiece of some kind, a bridge, some sort of projections at the shoulders of the instrument, and four strings running the length of the instrument, fixing to an endpeg or tailpiece, and to pegs in a pexbox. The Parma sculpture, which has been used as the basis of most recreations I've seen, is only vaguely typical. It does not demonstrate the waisting evident in practically all other versions of the instrument. The Exeter Cathedral version shares that seeming atypical feature, perhaps because of the simplicity of the overall sculpture. I don't think a "representative" instrument could be directly based on either, though they of course add to the overall impression/morphology. I would also like to represent the instrument in its heyday, around 1300, so the Parma version (the earliest form/date) also seems a bit out of the direct running.

I have decided to kind of average the Cantigas, the Strasbourg, 1310 English MS, and 14th Cent. Paris MS forms into a kind of sampled final lines. As the rebec I made was a peasant style instrument (very simple lines and no decoration), and as the one surviving example of the instrument (the Winchester Gittern) is extremely ornate almost to the point of absurdity (and even dates to 1300 or so), I have decided to make this a more elaborate instrument, with more rich decoration. I have found and acquired tools for some detail work, and have found a supplier of legal ivory and mammoth ivory, so I plan on doing a richly inlaid instrument, with some carving and decorative work. The widest piece of spruce I can get for the soundboard is 20cm wide (to keep it in one piece), so that fairly determines the baseline dimensions (20cm wide!). The final finished plans are below. For those interested, you may click on the image to get the hi-rez printable version, which should print at 1/2 scale (though a ruler is provided on the image to scale it appropriately). That file is large (like 900K) so it may take a while to download.

As I plan it now, the bridge, tailpiece top add, and inlays on the corner trefoils will all be ivory. The carved head will be added on as a separate piece, but will be carved out of the yellow cedar I'm using for the body (from the cutoff scrap). I will probably inlay the face, or something like that. The frets in the original were to be wood or bone - I will continue to use the ivory for them. I conveniently found a program to calculate fret spacings for a chromatic scale of any length, so that is what the fret spacing is based on - it is chromatic, as opposed to the probable period diatonic. Also, the backplate, much as in other instruments, will probably also be decorated. This will either be an inlaid pattern of holly leaves (echoing the shape of the instrument), or some kind of acanthus vines. I will put up that design when I have a chance to work more with the ivory for the inlay, and see what is realistically possible. There is also a good possibility I may carve a pattern of leaves into the sides of the instrument (wrapping around the back curve), but that design has yet to be exactly worked out.

So we now start with the block of wood. In this case, I've chose a nice block of yellow cedar that I acquired from NW Wood at a very reasonable price. It is close grained for a nice dense piece and good stiffness, but is significantly softer than the rock maple I used for the rebec, and I feel a need for something a little softer to work in for the intricate carving necessary in this piece. If it turns out that this is TOO soft, I will try to again get a maple block, but I'm hoping this will work. The pure untouched block is here:

First, I draw the body plan on the wood.

Second, the hollowing out of the body cavity. This is easier to do first, when the block isn't rounded or having pointy bits on it - a lesson I learned from the rebec. Unlike with the rebec, I am not concerning myself with using only "non-power tools", so I will be drilling out a good portion of this with a drill as follows:

I drilled out a mosaic of holes over the area to be hollowed out, using a drill bit that I had put a kind of stopper on to keep it from going in too deeply. This could have also been achieved by using a drill press - but I only have a mini drill press that would not take a bit any bigger than 1/8 inch, and wanted to work a little larger than that. These holes are 3/8 of an inch. This took about an hour and a half, between drawing out the mosaic and drilling the holes. One thing with working with the yellow cedar - the entire house smelled of cedar for two days after doing this!

Next, I took the scoop chisel to it and whacked out the inbetween spaces. Since the wood is already "cut" at the drill holes, its easy to take out large chunks quickly, simply snapping them out. Also this wood is a LOT softer than the maple I used for the rebec (and for the vihuela neck and head, which I'm also doing presently and kicking myself for not using the cedar for), so it works much more quickly and easily. This picture shows how much I was able to cut out in one evening's work.

The remaining bits, including right-angling the rest of the sides took a bit more work and about three more sessions of whacking at it with the chisel, but the final roughed out hole can be seen here. Before sanding it down and working out the area of the trefoils, I intend to cut out the instrument from the block. That way I can thin the walls with better control.

Third, I cut the body out from the block of wood with a hand saw and a coping saw (the scroll saw I have won't get through the almost 3 inch thick wood of the body - its just a little too thick). Unfortunately, in the process, disaster strikes! There is an internal crack in the wood, which emerges as I cut the wood out. I have it separated out here to show it (held apart with a screw). Bummer. Well, back to the starting block.

As of this point, I have acquired another block of wood (actually two, in case this happens again) to begin work again. This block is eastern maple, and is a bit harder than the cedar, but no where near as hard as the tiger maple of the rebec. In a recent trip to England where I got to look at a couple of originals and reproductions (see the Warwick Castle Gittern photos above, for example), I have decided to redesign the instrument a little bit. First, I am thinning it down from three inches thick to just over two inches thick in the body. Partially done for ascethetic reasons, partially because almost all of the examples of reproductions I've seen so far have been only about 2 inches deep, and partially because it makes sawing the thing that much easier. I've also decided that the trefoil corner designs are more abnormal than standard, and have decided to square them off more, something like an averaging of the Queen Mary Psalter rounded corners and the 14th cent. Paris MS drawing. The trefoil design will still appear in the inlay.

Here is the new happy maple block. It is eastern maple, measures 22 3/4 inches long by 8 3/4 inches wide by 2" thick, and weighs a whopping 10 1/2 pounds! I sawed a corner off of it to see if it was as hard as the tiger maple from which the rebec was made; it proved softer, but still a lot harder than the cedar. Still it was workable, so I began.

Step 1: draw out the pattern on the wood. I had to sand off the sealant that was on the wood to get a good look at the grain. I tried to let the grain pattern of the wood dictate the orientation of the instrument. The large whorls I tried to roughly center the body-cavity on, and where the grain draws thinner I aimed the neck. Note also the more squared off corners as I was mentioning earlier.

Next we draw the mosiac to drill out the holes. It makes it easier to do quickly. I don't necessarily follow it exactly, but it acts as a decent guide. The blocks are 1/2 inch squares.

Then I take a 1/2" drill bit and add a "stopper" onto it, as seen here. I'm only using a hand drill, so I use this method to keep from drilling too deeply into the body. The depth is set at about 1 5/8 inches or so. The stopper is made with cloth tape.

Step 2: drill out the holes as best I can. The maple is definitely a lot harder than the cedar. This took three sessions of drilling, as the drill super-heated very quickly trying to bore through the wood, and I think by the end the drill bit had been dulled somewhat, as it seemed to be chopping though the wood rather than slicing through it. Nonetheless, it has been accomplished. My wife claimed that the smell here was of chocolate chip cookies baking.

And yes, it makes a lot of saw dust! We decided not to give the maple pile to the bunny... Here you can see the instrument in total with the drilled holes.

Next comes carving out that space cleanly. For this, I used a couple of tools. The primary gouging was done by a 1/2" straight edge scoop gouge shown below. As you can see, it has seen a lot of use, and the handle has been practically beaten to death, thus the tape wrap. For the smaller corner areas, the V scoop gouge proved effective.


The most difficult portion of the hollowing out was actually getting the back and front walls vertical, as this meant direct cutting perpendicular to both directions of the grain of the wood. The larger 1/2" scoop was just dulling itself trying to cut into that, so I used a small 3/8" curved (about a 20 curve)chisel hammered straight down to try to shape the walls. That is the one below. With it see my happy new mallet, of really hard maple. The marks you see on it are just scrapings of the wax that coats it - the wood itself hasn't been dented yet! Works MUCH better than the normal hammer I was using before.

And the finished hollowed space. I've run a plane over the floor of the hollow to basically smooth it, and used a rotary tool sander to smooth out the side walls, resorting to sandpaper in a couple of corners. The floor has been left about 3/8" thick. About 1/8" of that will be lost to smoothing and leveling the bottom, and at least another 1/8" to the relief carving that will be done on the bottom of the instrument.

Next is to cut out the rough shape from the block of wood. For this I am using my trusty Stanley Saw, shown below. Cutting through the maple is tough, harder than the cedar, but still easier than the tiger maple of the rebec. Also, this saw is a lot better than the one I was using to cut the rebec block. This is with the first couple of gross cuts done.

The remainder of the outer body shaping was done with a combination of the big saw (cutting out the indents on the sides), coping saw (used mostly around the tail trefoil), chisels (straight edge and curved edge to shape various bits of the sides), my heavy handled file (to straighten out the wings, and to do final shaping all around), and a small amount of rotary tool work (mostly to clean up the tail trefoil and the indents between the neck and wings).

These two images show the more or less final outer shape of the body. The angled view shows the tail trefoil going all the way to the bottom of the instrument. The original plans had it only going half-way down, but I think it looks better this way, and the tail trefoil of the Warwick gittern was the full thickness of the body, so its probably more accurate. I've started thinning out neck - still needs some thinning out from the images that are here. But the pegbox has its fully rounded shape, the wings are clean and crisp, and the curve of the body is in its final form. The walls have been left a little thick, especially at the tail end, to accommodate the relief carving that will be done on the sides.

The next bit on the body is to fully shape the neck and the pegbox. The pegbox starts out as a thick cylinder with a stubby tail pointing back toward the body. I need to carve out more space in the "hook" of the tail, enough to fully get my thumb in there (as that is the described method of play) easily. The neck also needs to be significantly thinned out (mostly with chisels and the big file). Next the back of the pegbox needs to be hollowed out from behind. This is done 1.) to lighten the instrument significantly and 2.) so that the pegs don't have to get through two solid inches of wood - rather only a half inch or so. Images of that will follow shortly.

Meanwhile, I also did a quick test to see if carving the sides was feasible. I hadn't tried carving the hard maple yet to see what can of detail could be done, so before I wrecked the main block, I decided to do an experimental bit on some of the scrap blocks. This is a piece that was cut from the neck area, and is about 2" tall. I tried roughly carving out a fairly standard ivy leaf pattern (much as shows up on the borders of contemporary manuscripts), and it was a lot easier than I was expecting. I did a little bit of experimental binding on the top (of ebony) just to sample that a bit, and that also proved rather successful. So the instrument will indeed be carved on the body sides and back.

This is the roughing out of the neck and pegbox complete. The neck has been fully thinned and rounded somewhat. The hook has been sliced out and curls slightly back toward the neck. This was done with a combination of my new mid-sized chisels (more on them a little later when I do the side/bottom carving), the heavy file (which actually removes a surprisingly large amount of material quickly), and a some work with the dremel sander bits, which helped smooth out the hook joint and the hard angle where the neck and body meet. The hollowing of the pegbox was rather successful, and was done in a similar fashion to the hollowing of the body. I drilled a series of holes in the space, leaving about 1/2-5/8 of an inch at the bottom for the pegs to penetrate. Then chisels were used to chop out a fair amount of the wood in the interspace between the drilled holes. However the narrow deep space was hard to straighten the walls easily (not enough space to maneuvre with the chisels, so I resorted to the router attachment on the dremel to router the walls to straighten them (you can see a couple of the router ridges near the bottom on the photo). All this has yet to be sanded, of course, pending the surface carving.

Back on the other side of the instrument, with the neck shaping mostly finished, I was able to extend the body cavity forward toward the neck another 1/2 or so (removing more weight - yeah!), and decided that with the tail trefoil extending to the bottom of the body, I didn't need the back wall of the instrument to be quite so thick, so I thinned that down to the smooth curve of the rest of the walls (compair to the "outer body" image above to see the differences).

So now that the body has been fully roughed out, the detail surface carving can be added. Like the Warwick Castle Gittern above, instruments were often highly decorated in relief carving. For additional examples, I have here the Venus Rebec from 15th Century Venice from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (note particularly the side floral carvings), a lyra di Bracchio from approximately 1500 (present location unknown), with a wonderful greenman theme, and a 14th Cent. Italian Citerone from the Metropolitan Museum of NYC with a pair of lovers hidden amongst the elaborate greenery. I have decided to carve some designs on my instrument to make it more of a noble instrument.

In keeping the with the "holly leaf" theme, I've decided to decorate the instrument in a leaf theme. Several areas of the instrument will be carved: the back plate will bear a greenman design with leaf pattern around it, the sides curling up to the wings will have a leaf motif relief carved into them, the neck will have some leaves curling up it, and the endplates of the wings will have some leaf patterns carved in. I decided to try to mimic fairly directly existing historical patterns. To that end, I found the leaf border pattern from the 14th century French Book of Hours above, and a pleasent Greenman from LeMans Cathedral in France. Using as a reference point, I will draw up the designs to put onto the citole.

Here are the pencilled designs I plan to carve into the citole - perhaps went a bit overboard, but looks really nice to me. Wrapping around the curved sides is the leaf pattern from the Book of Hours. It will probably prove the toughest to carve, as the curved surface will be difficult to work with. One the back plate I have centered the greenman in the lower body - he's a variation of the LeMans greenman, but still has a strong resemblence. He is surrounded by swirling leaf patterns designed in the same mode as the leaves on the sides of the instrument. The neck has similarly been decorated with curling leaves stretching up the back of the neck. I plan to start on the neck, as it should be easiest bit to carve (grain is going with me, and even though slightly curved surface, there is little danger of carving too deeply).

Tools, tools and more tools! The images here are of the the medium, small and micro tools I'm using to do the carving. The files with the red handles are the medium files, used for some cleanup of edges and shaping of the body. The small metal files are used to do some cleanup and shaping of the small carving. There are also the micro-files (also red handled, but REALLY tiny - most only 1/16 of an inch across) that you'll see below with the rosette carving in the ivory. The black line in the image is one inch long, for scale.

There are also three sets of chisels. The large set is used to shape parts of the body (including the heal, neck etc.) and for gross removal of wood on the neck and sides carving areas. The dark handled small chisels are the primary carving tools (most are about 3-4 mm across) that I use to shape the forms. The light handled micro chisels (about 1-2 mm) are for working in the really tight corners, or for carving the lines. They also will help with the rosette carvings. The black line in the image is one inch long, for scale.

Here is the relief carved neck. Primary carving was done with the small chisels, additional finishing with the small and micro files. Final sanding will wait until I get the rest of the carving done (I only want to do one long sanding pass), as I also want to do a little dremel work on the peghead and the neck/body joint. Came out pretty well. Next up will be the back (the greenman).

In the interim, I've also been working ahead on some other parts and problems of the instrument. One very elaborate piece will be the ivory rose that is going on the front center. It will be bracketted at the corners with smaller ivory inlays. Here is the pattern (actual size 2.5 inches) to be used on the ivory rose - it is adapted (and simplified, if you can believe that) from a lute rose from about 1500. Next to it is the piece of antique elephant ivory that will be used to carve the rose. This was obtained from The Warther Museum, who sells legal ivory from cut up antique tusks, mostly to artisans (he also makes really amazing ships!). This piece is about 3 inches square or so, and about 1/8-3/16 inch thick. The next image is the pattern drawn onto the ivory. All the darker bits are to be removed. The next image shows the holes drilled out. This was done with tiny finger drills (picture to come), hand spun into the ivory to make all the holes. After this, the micro-files are used to shape each of the holes into the appropriate forms (next image shows this in process). The filing is very slow and tedious, and I tend to carry it around with the micro-files in my pocket and do the filing in little snippets while waiting for movies to start, waiting for trains, etc. Sort of like women used to do knitting. The whole rosette then was thinned down a bit, as it was too heavy at its original thickness for the soundboard and some of the smaller holes were actually smaller in diameter than the thickness of the ivory, which made for very difficult work. The fifth image shows it getting really close now, with a good portion of it now open space. As you can see, for a variety of reasons, I've altered the design a bit as I've gone along. The ultimate goal is to get a kind of lacy look. The final stage shows the finished rose.

Doing demos and such I went back to carving out the back of the decorated citole. The first stage of carving the back is now done - all the "background" area has been removed, and the back floor roughly leveled. This is done with the small chisels above, and took way too long. Next up is the carving of the raised bits into 3-dimensional relief, which hopefully shouldn't take nearly as long (actually did take less time).

Continuing the carving on citole one with the greenman. Carved in simple relief - the grain of the wood makes it a little difficult to make out, but that will change a lot when the finish is added. Started with the deepest cut areas (around the eyes, around the nose), and then worked mostly bottom to top. Again, this was done mostly with the small chisels, with smoothing via the medium files. Its about 1/8 - 3/16 inches deep. Next we carve all the leaves!

Rounding out all the leaves was rather tedious, involving beveling them with the chisels, and then filing the bevels into smooth rounded edges. This is the final back image. All of the leaves and vines have been finished. The final sanding will be done with the final pass of all of the body (not particularly looking forward to that...) The edges of the carved out area still need to be cleaned up a bit - I was debating between beveling them at about a 45 degree angle, or leaving them as harder right angles. The right angles seems more appropriate, I think.

Next part on Citole One is to the do the side carvings. The curves of the body sides make it a little more difficult, as its hard to get a surface to brace it against carefully when working (I tend to work either on a small coffee table, or literally with it on my lap on the floor, not having access to or space for a proper workbench), but the start shown here proved easier than I was expecting.

The side carvings are now done. The top image shows one of the finished sides. The relief carving follows the curve around to the narrowest part of the waist, and buts almost right against the tail. The second image shows that the side carving is definitely shallower than the back carving (also shows how rounded the leaves/vines are on the back). The walls need to be rather thin in the final instrument to keep the weight of the block down for good resonance. The third image shows the little leaf curl that was carved into the outer face of the wings of the instrument.

Now that the carving on the body is done, the floor and walls of the cavity have to thinned out to about 1/8 of an inch, and made sure that the walls meet the floor at right angles (rather than scooped angles they presently do). First the floor had to be dropped about 3/8-1/2 an inch, which is getting increasingly more difficult as the wood is drying and aging (harder and more brittle, and chipping my chisels). In the image here on the back wall you can see the chisel marks showing how much farther down it had to go. I've also started thinning out the walls (esp. visible on the left in this picture).

Having finished the decorative carving on the back and sides, time to move onto the peg head. I abandoned the idea of attaching a additional piece of wood for an overhanging head as both not true to historical instrument construction, and also because it would look attached and out of place. Practically it also would overweight the head, and make holding the instrument awkward. So instead I decided to continue the relief carving around the peghead. Since dragon/animal heads seemed to be the norm for the end of the head, I carved a small dragon face into the end of the peghead. The curling vines found on the other parts of the sides were then continued around the curve of the head.

On the top of the peghead (where the pegs will stick out), I need to lower the level of the floor a bit so that the endnut could be held in place by the downward tension of the strings. So I decided to give the top of the peghead a little design, as per the original plans. This will probably be taken down a bit farther and evened out a little more when I get the fingerboard in place, but I wanted it at least started.

At the other end of the body was the little tail trefoil, which was left barely roughed out. I didn't want to finish it until last, as I tend to handle the body a great deal while doing the carving, and the pointy bits on this would have been annoying to hold. But now the rest is done, I finished it off, beveling the faces and raising the bottom end up a bit. What is not immediately evident from these pictures is that the bottom surface is actually angled upwards, but the perspective of the image doesn't show that very well..

FINALLY, getting away from the body block to the other parts. This is the soundboard. It starts off as a piece of Carpathian white spruce (a master grade piece, very nice, from LMII. You will note the positions where the tailpiece will end, and where the bridge will ultimately go. I've decided not to inlay the other decorations on the soundboard, as I think it will make it too heavy. The large central rosette will be the ivory one above. But instead of the inlaid flower patterns I'd originally planned, I've decided to use four smaller rosettes carved directly into the board. Their locations can be seen marked out on the piece (this is actually the back). Next to cut out the board and start work on the rosettes.

This shows the rosettes in process. The upper left has had the pilot holes drilled with the micro finger drills, which is the first step. From there, I take the micro-files and start opening up the holes to shape, as can be seen in the upper right side. The two lower rosettes have been completed. This is slow and tedious work, as not only do the rosettes have to be internally symmetrical, but they have to be lined up as close as possible to their opposing duplicate. I did encounter an interesting problem with this spruce. The dark grain wood is VERY much harder than the light grain wood, so there is a marked tendency of files/drills/etc. to skip off the hard bands into the soft ones, making the fine precision work even more slow.

The corner rosettes done, now turning to the central rosette. The ivory rose has been finished. It is going to be edged by a strip of ebony and then inset into the soundboard. The strip of ebony first is steam bent into shape using a bending iron, and allowed to dry overnight taped into shape (it is slightly smaller than the rosette, but overlaps at least half of its length. This turned out to be a "learning" experience, as I hadn't done much bending before, and the ebony is quite brittle, so this took two tries to get correct.

The rosette has now been fitted into the ebony edging and the ebony sanded smooth so the jointing isn't visible. Now comes the careful process of cutting a hole in the soundboard just exactly to shape.

The rosette fitted into the soundboard. There is still a bit of leveling that needs to be done carefully with scrapers to bring the level of the rosette flush with the soundboard. The differing hardnesses of the ivory and spruce make sanding impractical until final smoothing.

In the interim (there is no picture here as nothing really to see) is the long tedious process of scraping, filing and chiseling the carved portions of the body smooth and clean, so that the rough chisel marks are removed where-ever possible. It is long and slow, but the new scrapers make some if it easier, and I've discovered the flat chisel blades can be used as a kind of scraper. One change was made to the body - the tail trefoil was thinned top to bottom to take up slightly less than half of the body width, rather than the 3/4 it previously had, as I've decided to loop the tail-rope around it entirely rather than cut a hole through it. Otherwise all that clean-up is finally done!

Starting now on the other parts at last. This is the brace that will be attached under the soundboard to help support it. It is carved of the very light wide grain spruce, and shaped to an inverted T cross-section (see small insert). It will be positioned about 1.5 inches behind the bridge on the underside of the soundboard at its widest point.

Anticipating the assembly of the body, I've been experimenting with different ways to cut the channel for the edge binding. For Citole 2 below I used a chipping method by hand with the mini-chisels. While that worked, it was horrifically slow, and ran the perpetual danger of cracking the edge. The maple is significantly more brittle at this point (being long aged now unfortunately) than the cherry of that instrument, and I'm not sure that I want to take the chance with that method. The "normal" ways of doing this are one of two options. First, a violin purfling cutter going around the edge and then chipping out with a sharp knife on the side. This is only mildly more efficient than my first way, and still runs the danger of cracking the very thin edge. Alternatively, it is routed out. My previous attempts at routing had been not horribly successful, as I found it difficult without a table mount to control the router, especially around the sharp corners. However, I discovered a piloted binding router bit at Stewart McDonald luthier's store, which proved promising. I made a mock body to try it on with my dremel router attachment, including sharp corners, soft corners and a curve out of a spare block of cherry wood (cut off from instrument #2 I think). I cut this edge binding channel in about 10 minutes. Very clean. Extremely easy. Guess how I'm going to do the real instrument...

The top fitting are now being tackled. The tailpiece was cut from a block of American holly wood. The original intention had been to carve out the design on the tailpiece that you see drawn onto it. You can also see the placement for the holes.

The fingerboard piece was cut from the same block of holly as the tailpiece (they actually are the same color, but had to get closer to photograph the tailpiece and the flash whited it out a bit). The frets will be cut from ebony.

It is here that I decided that I didn't want to carve the tailpiece and leave the fingerboard plain. The elaborate carving all over the body made the top of the instrument suddenly look very simple. I initially had planned to edgebind the top, including the fingerboard, with ebony binding. Then I decided it might look interesting to do the same with the tailpiece - edge it in the ebony as well. With the high contrast of the white woods and ebony binding, however, the tailpiece carving would barely be visible. I also initially considered it impractical to relief carve the fingerboard, and just carving the tailpiece seemed not sufficiently decorative. So I started to go overboard, and inlay the leaf and vine pattern into the tailpiece, which would in turn allow me to inlay a similar design into the fingerboard. This involves taking the ebony wood I have (a bass guitar fingerboard is what I am using), and cut it into two thin plates to try to then cut out the inlay pieces.

However, as often happens when working through this stuff, I did a little bit of test, and decided that 1) the inlay was going to take forever 2) it didn't mesh well with the relief carving elsewhere on the instrument and 3) that I couldn't find any pre-Renaissance examples of inlaid instruments, but there were many relief carved ones. SO, after due consideration, I decided instead to relief carve it as originally intended. The tailpiece and the lower, unfretted portion of the fingerboard were thus decorated using a very similar pattern to the rest of the instrument. The fingerboard piece is actually only a minor variant of the scroll work over the greenman's head on the back of the body.

Using the small chisels and files, and the little finger drills, the tailpiece now has the surface carving and the string holes. The holes may need to be widened, especially the tail-gut holes, but I'll worry about that when it comes to stringing the instrument. Still haven't decided whether I'm going to add the ebony edging on the tailpiece. I probably will, but am going to make sure I have enough to go around the whole body before wasting it here.

Cutting the ebony frets. The first step is to cut a thin flat piece out of the thick ebony fingerboard chunk I have. I ended up clamping it upright to a wooden chair back and using a fret saw to slowly cut down the piece. Took a very long time, as the wood is 3+ inches thick. That thin sheet is then sliced into a "comb" of equal width teeth, in this case six teeth (as there will be six frets). The teeth are then cut off, and equaled out into clean square cross-sections with the files. A good portion of the rest of this flat piece became the backing on the ivory rose on the Three Dimensional Art page, just so you know the remaining wood and effort into cutting it doesn't go to waste. It all gets used for something.

Carving the design and marking the frets onto the fingerboard. The functional string length will be 13.75 inches, and I used a fret calculator to set the spacing. The carving went through a number of designs before I realized I could match the back design pretty closely, and that tied in together well. Here you can see the first bits of cutting into the edges of the design.

Here are the final fingerboard piece all carved and leveled, with the slots for the frets widened to receive them, and the pile of frets. The second picture shows the gluing in of the frets (you can see the earlier sketches of the fingerboard designs below), "clamping" them down with handweights.

Turning now to the soundboard, here is the clamping (again using handweights) of the brace to the back of the soundboard. You can see the marking for where the bridge will be (on the other side, of course). Anybody want some free Buffy videos? We have all the DVD's now...

With the brace dry, the soundboard is then carefully lined up with the body and glued down. Again, using handweights as my clamps.

The soundboard edge is cleaned up more or less flush to the body. The neck is then hollowed out (to lighten the instrument and make it not quite so nose heavy) in preparation for attaching the fingerboard. Normally I'd have probably just thinned the whole neck, but the carved designs make that not an option.

The fingerboard is glued down, once again clamped by the handweights. Then the edges are cleaned up all around the fingerboard as well, being very careful to not chip off the frets.

The next task is to cut the edge for the edge binding on the top. After having done several experiments (see above), I settled on the dremel with a router bit attachment. I cut a scrap piece of pine wood to act as an outer brace to make sure that the dremel wouldn't tilt. The whole body was clamped to the table by a C-clamp attached to the pegbox. It was difficult to make sure that very soft soundboard didn't chip badly, but overall it went well.

Showing the finished cut edgebinding ledge. You will note that at the tail, where the tail-loop will pass over the edge of the soundboard, I've cut a slightly larger ledge to fit a larger piece of the ebony. I've had the problem of the tailgut cutting into the soundboard before, and took note of Marco Salerno's solution to that problem - inlaying a small rectangle of hardwood where the tailgut crosses over the edge. I will be doing the same here.

This image shows the process of steam bending the edgebinding into shape. I have a violin-body style bending iron (more or less just a metal rod that gets hot, to about 220 degrees or so). The idea is that you wet down the wood, and then the softened and swelled grains are able to be better manipulated. The steaming further softens them, and helps to "set" them when they dry. Leather works in a similar way (though if you get leather too hot, it actually polymerized, and you end up with brittle plastic). However, in practice I ran into several problems here. First, the original edgebinding that I had gotten to put on was solid ebony about 3/32nd inch thick, which nicely matched the ledge-cutter width. Unfortunately, the practical right angle turn at the backside of the wings proved to be too severe to bend the ebony into shape. After snapping the pieces about 10 times, I decided this was impractical. So I used progressively thinner pieces of ebony until I got one that I could bend without snapping into the severe curve. The problem with this was that the thickness that I was finally able to get to shape was too thin for the ledge, and meant that I now had to laminate the edgebinding. This meant cutting and bending twice the number of pieces, and then gluing them together. So I set about doing this. Each side of the instrument had four pieces - the short curve from the neck to the peak of the wing, the two short straight lengthes on the outer edges of the wing, and the long single piece that goes from the back corner of the wing to the tailpiece. Each had to separately fitted to its space and bent to shape. The alternating process of fitting it to the body, steaming to shape, refitting to body, etc. had a somewhat amusing side-effect - I accidentally steamed off the soundboard of the citole! It was sitting too close to the bending iron, and the repeated application of steaming hot wet pieces of wood eventually undid the glue (which, technically, is how the luthier glue is supposed to respond). So, after a break of cleaning off the top and top edge of glue, and re-gluing the soundboard back onto the body, I was able to finally (more carefully this time around) finish shaping the remaining bits of the edgebinding.

The edgebinding layers then had to be glued together. Using piles of clothespins and bear clamps, I was able to glue the two layers of the edgebinding together. Unfortunately I could only scrounge enough clamps to do one piece at a time, so this took a little while. You can see here the last piece going together - the rest are scattered on the table next to it.

Next up is attaching the edging to the body. Each piece now had to be exactly fitted to its location, ends cut to exact length and the corners beveled so they met at clean angles. Then each piece in order (as they have to be fitted against each other) has to be glued into place. The first problem encountered was that the glued laminates proved not to be as flexible as the thick wood, so a little very careful reshaping had to be done (remembering this time that steaming it would functionally undo the glue holding them together). Once that issue was solved, the second problem was how to hold them under the slight tension necessary into place while the glue dried. Obviously clamps on the odd surfaces would be very difficult, and the soft wood of the soundboard could be easily damaged. The solution I came up with was cloth tape. The tape isn't horribly sticky, but sticks to itself well. As a result, it doesn't mark even the soft wood of the soundboard, but can hold things under tension. Starting with the front curves, I attached each piece. Sometimes the taping got a little elaborate (the large side pieces - my wife likes to refer to this as the "bondage citole"), but it all worked.

After the glue had dried, I took a very sharp knife (like an x-acto blade) and trimmed down the edges flush with the top of the soundboard. Done very slowly as carefully, as the very thin pieces snagged grain easily, and glue layer between them was quite hard. Became a balance of force and control. After that was a exceptionally tedious process of going around the whole body and cleaning up the sides to be flush with the edge binding. This was done with the scrapers and the files. I also took the opportunity to straighten out and better balance the top curves and points on the wings of the body, as they were a little angled from straight.

Two last little bits of ebony had to be added. First was the little block at the tail to keep the tailgut from cutting into the soundboard. I used a piece cut from the same piece that I made the frets from, as the wood was conveniently the exact same thickness necessary. The other piece was optional, but I decided to add it anyway. I decided to add an edgebinding to the exposed end of the fingerboard to "complete" the black line around the body that the edgebinding created. I had debated edging the fingerboard, but two problems argued against it. First, the edges of the design at the base of the fingerboard were too thin to be thinned further for an edgebinding. Second, the neck itself would have had to be thinned, which potentially would have affected the carving on its underside. Also I didn't like the look that much, so decided entirely against it. However I did like the little endbinder for the fingerboard, so that was made from a single thickness of the ebony edgebinding.

The finished binding all in place now. All that is left now on the body of the instrument is final sanding and applying the finish.

The tailpiece also was to acquire edgebinding. Four straight pieces of the thick ebony edging were cut and glued into place. Here you can see them having just dried. After that they are carved down to the surface level of the tailpiece, and sanded all around to smooth out and round the corners. Finally, the tailpiece has its holes widened (you can see two of the lower right holes have been started) with the needle files. I'll have a shot of the finished tailpiece in a bit.

Turning next to the pegs. Did about 20 or 30 sketches of peg designs, and decided on a kind of oak leaf shaped one as the final choice. Here you see the pair of holly wood bits that will be carved into the pegs, with the spaces for the pegs marked out.

I have a mini-lathe that I then used to turn the blocks to cut two pegs out of each one. Top here is the rough block, below is the block after being through the lathe.

The turned block then is cut into two pegs that look like the right one in this image. That is then carved down into the oakleaf shape that will be the final pegs (left) and the peg stem run through the violin pegshaver to taper it appropriately. I had debated inlaying the lines of the leaf in ebony, but after a small test decided that if done correctly, they look just drawn on. And I think the 3-D effect of the carved lines better matched the rest of the instrument. My wife agreed.

Here are the four complete pegs in place. I had deepened the depression in the top to allow for the strings to turn down to hold the nut in place. The roughed out nut is also visible here.

Finishing up the body. The fingerboard is finished with rubbed oil (several coats). The body is then coated with an oil varnish, applied with a small brush. The large number of nooks and crannies mean that each coat took about two and a half hours, and then that has to dry for at least 24 hours before the next coat can be applied, etc. Three coats were applied this way, with light sanding and burnishing inbetween each coat. The wood did not really tiger stripe, but the curling and swirls in the grain did come out nicely. The maple turned a nice golden color. The spruce however took several tries to get an even coat, and even so it darkened in a slightly uneven pattern. Not sure why. Doesn't look bad, just unexpected, as the sitka spruce I've used in the past didn't acquire that kind of mottling.

Setting the height for the bridge and nut. Both pieces are intially cut WAY too high, and then I file a notch into them and continually lower the notch until the action (height of the strings above the fretboard) is about where I want it. I use a piece of black nylon string as a mock-up for the gut strings (rather than wasting the rather expensive strings on such a set-up). Once the notches are set where I want them, I carve down the nut and bridge to a level with the notch, and add the remaining notches for the other strings at their appropriate spacing. The nut and bridge are then given a light coating of oil to seal them. With the gaboon ebony, this turns the dark brown wood a serious jet black! Neither is glued into place - both are held in place by the tension of the strings.

All the pieces are now down and ready for assembly with the strings. The four pegs need still to be drilled, which was done with the little finger drills. Otherwise it is ready for final set-up.

The completed instrument. The first image shows back, side and top, the second image a perspective view. Overall I think it came out very nicely, and the tone is brighter and stronger than on the other ones, probably because of the maple versus the cherry wood (harder usually equates to brighter). Strings are made of natural gut, acquired from Gamut Strings, run by Dan Larsen. I've used his strings almost exclusively for my vielles and harp, and they have worked really well to this point. The instrument is presently tuned G d g d', with the lowest two strings the same notes as the lowest strings of a violin. String diameters are (in mm) .52, .74, 1.04, and 1.50 for those that care about such things. The tail gut is some leftover 1.54 string I had from stringing the bray harp. As soon as I've had a chance to practice it a bit and get it to sound good, I will put up a recording of what the instrument sounds like.

I ordered a custom hardcase from Kingham MTM Cases in England, which makes very nice cases for early instruments. Got a little whacked on the exchange rate (dollar sucks at the moment to the pound), but otherwise a very nice case. Wooden base body, covered in leather, lined with padding and crushed green velvet. You provide schematics to Kingham, and they build the case to match. Took about eight weeks to arrive, but came out quite excellently.

Top is the set of drawings for this version. Next is the block with the pattern drawn on. Third shows the body rough cut - I did this using a scroll orbital saw I have - the cherry is much softer than the maple, and I can use the power tools readily on it. The fourth shows the more cleaned up body and its more or less final outline. The fifth image shows where I did the standard drilling out of all the holes to simplify the hollowing of the body block.

This is followed by using a full sized router to hollow out the body and the peg-head, which took only a couple of hours one afternoon, and then I used the saw and chisels above to rough out the neck. It is truly amazing the difference in the ease of working with the softer cherry - the wood removal is very quick and simple. And the block already weighs half what the maple does, even though it has a lot more wood in it - the difference in density is VERY obvious here. It also resonates really loudly, especially with the hammered chisels. The third picture is the floor of the body thinned down to appropriate thickness using the mid-sized chisels above. Still has to be finally smoothed out, but is getting there.

Here you see the body block more or less completed (little bit of cleaning up on the inside to do, but the shaping is done). The neck has been thinned down and rounded off. The pegbox has been rounded off cleanly, the hollowing smoothed out and cleaned up, and the little backward hook carved out. The heel (where the neck meets the body) has been shaped, and seems sturdy enough to hold the string pressure, though I'll probably change the joining point to a crisper line rather than soft slope it is now. And the little tail stub has been cleaned up and rounded off smoothly. Obviously the final sanding pass hasn't been done, but that will be done once the soundboard and fingerboard are on. Mostly this was all done with files, and some dremel work, especially to shape the hook. There a little more clean up off the primary cavity (to thin the walls and floor down a little more), but next is the soundboard, tail and fingerboard.

Here is the soundboard, made from a sitka spruce board (1/2 of a jumbo guitar soundboard piece about 8" wide). First image shows penciling out the piece (tracing the shape off the actual body). Next I rough-cut the soundboard out of the wood with a coping saw. After this, I drilled out the holes of the rosette, and then filed them into shape with the mini and micro files. Last image shows the board with the finished rosette. There were gouges on one side where the drill had chopped rather than sliced into the soft spruce, so that will become the underside. The top then took a number of passes through my handheld belt-sander to thin it down to about 1/8 inch or so thick.

Still on citole number two. These are the chunks of wood that are making the other parts of the citole. On top is a piece of scrap ebony that the tailpiece, nut and bridge will be cut out of. Next is the piece of red cedar that will be used (already cut to length before this picture) as the support brace for the soundboard (at its widest point, more or less). On bottom is the piece of ebony that will be cut into the fingerboard. The globby stuff on it is sealing wax to keep the ebony from absorbing moisture, which it tends to do in long storage. The second picture shows the finished brace, roughly a soft upside-down T in cross-section, with tapering ends. This was carved with knives, and evened out with the long file.

Yet more citole number two. The finished back-brace has been glued onto the soundboard. It is just a tiny bit narrower than the body cavity, though I initially centered it off a little, and had to correct that with files after it had been glued. The edges of the soundboard are cleaned up a bit more with dremel and files, and then it is attached to the body of the citole. As in the past, I've found that hand-weights work very well as clamps for this purpose... this is my kitchen table. The glue is luthier glue I acquired from LMII.

This is the tailpiece of citole number two. It has been cut out of a bit of the ebony with the coping saw, and shaped with files and the little chisels. It will fit over the tail nubby of the body. The string holes hadn't been added when I took this picture (see below).

This is the fingerboard construction for citole number two. First, I cut out the fingerboard from a chunk of the ebony with the coping saw, then leveled it and straightened the edges with the belt-sander. There will only be six frets (short fingerboard only played in first position, as generally was true for medieval instruments). The functional string length will be 13.25 inches, and I used a fret calculator to set the spacing. The frets were carved from holly wood, originally from 1x1 inch block down to 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch, starting with coping saw and ending up with carving knives and files. The slots on the ebony were first cut with an Exacto mitre saw, then broadened to a wide V with the medium files. The last image shows the frets glued onto the fingerboard. Each had to be separately glued and clamped, which I did with the 15 lb. handweight. The shiny bits are some excess glue that got wiped onto the board - it was removed (eventually) with an Exacto knife and a little file work.

Citole Number Two as it stands to this point. The soundboard is now attached, and I've clean up the edges so that they are flush with the body, done mostly with files. I also cleaned up the neck joint a little more, and the tail joint a little more. At this point I brought it and the fingerboard to its soon-to-be owner, to make sure that she could get her fingers around the neck (she has rather small hands). After testing, I decided I needed to thin the fingerboard some more, and thin the neck just a little bit. The neck was thinned (top to bottom) with the heavy file a little bit; the fingerboard was thinned (top to bottom, or thickness)down to about 1/4 an inch with the belt-sander.

Citole Number Two - attaching the fingerboard. First, I cut off the frets flush with the fingerboard (so they didn't stick out too far), and lined up the fingerboard with the centerlines drawn on the body. The fingerboard was clamped (I used folded bristol board to cushion against the marks of the clamps on the wood of the neck and fingerboard/frets). When that was dry, I refinished the edges of the neck and fingerboard so they were flush, and bevel-edged the frets.

Citole Number Two - attaching the tailpiece. The angle of the tailpiece proved a challenge to clamp - I tried bracing it with the bristol board, but that didn't work. In the end, I just used the tried & true 15 lb. handweight to clamp it. Seemed to work fine. You can see the string-holes in the tailpiece now, spaced about 1/4" apart. Like with the fingerboard, when that was dry, I refinished the tail stub so that all the sides were flush with the tailpiece, and the joint-point of the tail to the body was edged rather than soft-blended.

Citole Number Two - small bits. Here are shown the little pieces of ebony that will become the end nut (the piece at the end of the fingerboard that the strings sit in), and the bridge. Obviously they haven't been finished yet at this point. The other picture shows what is happening with the pegs. I don't have a lathe, so turning the pegs is difficult (I have used a drill in the past, but it is rather awkward). So instead of scratch making them, I got a set of four ebony violin pegs from a music shop, and have decided to reshape them into more appropriate medieval shape. I cut out notches of the corners with a coping saw, and then used the dremel to flatten the surface of the peg, and then used the files to shape it into a kind of tapered club. This picture shows the starting and finishing points. The pegs finally with oiled with artist quality linseed oil.

Citole Number Two - the edge binding. Here was one of the bigger logistical problems - how to cut the ledge for the edge-binding? I had acquired some nice ebony binding strips from LMII, about 1/4 inch tall, 1/16 inch thick. My first thought was to try to use the dremel router to route out the space, but tests proved to be difficult to control. Rigging up the dremel base to try to control the depth proved impossible to maintain around the curves, and was entirely impossible to reach into the acute corners (I tested on scrap wood). So, instead I resorted to what I did in the test above - I used the mini-chisels to actually carve it out. I wedged a line around the instrument, and then chipped off the wood down to that line, and filed it smooth. It isn't extremely efficient (took about four hours to get all the way around the instrument), but it was controlled, and seemed to work. Next the edge binding is glued on.

Okay, I had a slight problem with the camera, so we lost the intermediate photos, and only have the photos of the finished instrument of Citole Number Two. I'll try to go through the final stages as best I might.

These images show the edge binding fairly cleanly as it ended up. The edge binding was made up of thin strips about 30" long of ebony. I cut very exacting lengths for each of the straight sections around the "wings" of the citole and beveled the meeting points so that they met flush on the corners. The curved sides of the instrument each had one long piece that was bent into shape by soaking the piece in warm water, and then steaming it (over a teakettle) and finally taping the softened strip to the body to mold it. When it dried it held the shape pretty well, and didn't crack. The binding was glued to the ridges, held in place by tape. When that had dried overnight, using sandpaper and my "Mouse" powered handsander, I sanded the binding flush to the sides and to the top of the body. Then the hold body was sanded down, corners rounded a little softer, and the top and bottom plates sanded smooth.

The last actual bit of carving was the peghead. I spaced the four holes for the pegs by making little paper circles that were slightly larger in diameter than the pegs were wide, and making sure there was clearance space for the pegs to turn completely and still have some space between them. Then a pilot hole was drilled with a powered hand drill slightly smaller than the narrowest end of the tapered peg. I have a violin peg hole reamer, so that was used then to ream the hole to the appropriate taper of the violin pegs. I also have a violin peg shaver (I've played violin a long time) and used that to make sure the pegs were of the same appropriate taper. The pegs, once fitted basically to the holes, were way too long, so I cut the excess ends off, and sanded and re-oiled the pegs. The next part was a new experiment. The strings had to pass over the endnut, and then somehow to the pegs on the other side of the peg-head. I had seen several historical re-creations use the methods of pass-through holes, so I wanted to see if they indeed were practical. For the gut strings I think they work pretty well (though I think wire strings would carve into the wood too badly - they would have had to have been braced with ebony or other really hard wood). So there are two rectangular holes that are just beyond the nut, cutting diagonally forward into the underside of the peghead, so that the strings can then be attached to the pegs there. The holes were first drilled, and then shaped using the mini- and micro-files. The peghead was then sanded and smoothed down.

This is the completed instrument, from top, side, bottom and angled views. After final sanding, the body, neck, and peghead were lacquered using a polymer lacquer, given about three/four coats. The cherry wood darkened slightly to a dull reddish color (I used no dyes), and the spruce to a pale golden yellow. The ebony of course ended up nearly black. I lacquered the tailpiece, but the endnut, bridge and fingerboard are only oiled with artist linseed oil (I just started doing oil painting, so I have it around the house now). The bridge is a floating bridge (meaning it's only held in place by the tension of the strings, not glued to the soundboard), as is the nut. The instrument was strung with natural gut strings acquired from Gamut Strings, where I get my vielle strings, and have been very satisfied with them. They are a little longer than violin strings (sounding length about the same, but the tail is set farther back). I filed the notches in the bridge and endnut with the microfiles, and strung her up. The end result was quite nice - it has more volume than I was expecting, a little louder than a lute. It is tuned Gdgd' (the first two strings same as a violin, the upper two one note lower than a violin), to make a nice open chord strum. Presently it is with its happy new owner Wendy Gash, who is slowly trying to learn it!

I was happy with how it came out, and worked out the problems that I wanted to.

This is the starting plan. It is a fairly close variant of the Queen Mary Psalter citole above, only with a dog's head rather than a horse's. The fitting will be made from walnut.

The block has been roughed out with handsaws. I'm always amazed how fast the saws go through the cherry vs. the hard maple.

Block has now been cleaned up a bit on the outside. The body has been shaped, and the fleur has been shaped for the full thickness of the body, though it will eventually be shaped narrower. The peg-block has been left large until I work out the exact dimensions of the dog head. I'm doing a model of the head in clay to work from (to have a 3-D model to carve from is much easier than trying to work from 2-D drawings), so once that has been worked out, I'll carve down the peghead to a more reasonable size. You can also see the start of the guide lines for the drilling out of the body.

In the interim, working on the soundboard, since carving out the rosette takes a bit of time. This is the design for the rosette.

The soundboard is the other half of the Carpathian white spruce (a master grade piece, very nice, from LMII that I got for Citole One. The guitar soundboard wood is sold in pairs for joining to make a jumbo-sized guitar, but these little instruments only require 1/2 the width, so one guitar soundboard makes two citoles, or three rebecs, or two oval fiddles, etc. The basic outline has been traced onto the board from the body block, and the rosette has been lined up on it for cutting.

The body block now has had all the holes drilled into the area that will be the cavity. This particular piece of cherry was a bit harder than the one used for Citole 2.

Starting to hack out the body cavity, though its a little hard to tell from this image exactly how much has been removed (about half at this point). This particular block is a little "shaggier" in grain than the previous block, which makes me nervous about the block splitting as I'm working on it. But so far everything has gone well.

This is the sculpted (in clay) model head for the greyhound pegbox, showing side, top and front views. He ends up pretty small to fit into the height of the wood for the block - about 2 1/2 inches from nose to ears - but shouldn't be too difficult to work. This isn't an exact version of the final appearance - mostly just a shape guide. The eyes, nose and mouth will be cut more cleanly in the wood than just scratched onto the surface as they are here for reference.

Having the model for how large the head will end up, I was now able to cut the sickle peg-head into rough shape. Overall body as it stands now. I've finished the rough-out of the body cavity, though now the walls need to be thinned to appropriate thickness (a somewhat careful process, as the shaggy grain of this particular block of cherry is prone is splitting - hmm, I notice I say that alot with this piece).

Side view of the rough out of the sickle peghead, before even I rounded off the neck. Getting into the space under the chin is going to be annoying.

3/4 views of the peghead being carved. The first shows the block just starting to be shaped, the ears cut out, and the chin thinned down. The neck of the instrument (as opposed to the dog) has be rounded off at this point, so you can see the wide corner of the pegbox. The second image shows the final shaping of the head, but before the eyes, nose, and mouth have been cut into the surface. The dog's neck has been thinned considerably, and the nose is quite narrow, though that is a little difficult to make out from this angle. The large ears are folded back along the back of the head. The carving was mostly done with the mini-chisels (brown handle above), whose marks can still be seen under the chin a bit and on the front corner of the pegbox as I was softening the sharp front corner. Next I have to hollow out the channel in the pegbox. I have the impression it most likely will have to be open to the bottom of the box, as threading the strings under the dog's nose may prove too annoying.

The rest of the pegbox has been carved out now. The box has been hollowed (done entirely with chisels) starting from the end of the nut down as far under the dog's nose as was reasonably able to be reached. I wanted to give the pegs as much clearance space as I could. The holes for the pegs were initially drilled with the finger drills, and then widened with a normal hand drill. Finally a peg reamer was used to taper the holes to fit the pegs. The pegs themselves will be added later. The peg diameters are slightly narrower than violin pegs, but not by much. Overall the pegbox region is about the size of violin, but a bit wider across, as the neck of the citole is significantly wider than the violin neck. You can also see the prep for the final carving of the dog features, as I mark out where the nose, eyes, and mouth are going to be.

Side view of the neck and peghead. The neck has now been thinned down to its final thickness of about 1/2 inch at the nut. The fingerboard is about 3/16 inch thick on top of that, which should be far more than enough strength for the low tension gut strings that will be on the instrument.

Starting the carving of the trefoil tailpiece. The block is visible here, cut down to about 1/2 of the thickness of the body. The three "circles" of the tail will be each rounded off more into a ball, with the joint to the body dramatically thinned, and around which the tail-gut will wrap to support the tailpiece.

Starting to round off the "balls" of the tailpiece. This is done entirely with the chisels at first, to rough shape the balls into form, though ultimately will be smoothed down with the files.

The end trefoil has been finally shaped with the small chisels and the medium files. These images are from top and underside behind, to give an idea of the thickness of the endball.

The carving for the rosette. Many little holes are drilled in the opening with the micro finger drills. The center block is cut out with an exacto knife, and then the final shaping of the opening is done with the micro diamond files. In the left image, you can see a couple of the holes untouched, some of the inner circle with the drilled holes, the cardinal four inner ones with the center area cut out, and the outer three cardinals more or less finished. The rosette is about two inches across. The second image shows the inner space fully complete. The rightmost image shows the final rosette. The carpathian spruce has a very large differential in hardness between its grains, so is a little more difficult to work. But it is significantly stronger and lighter than the sitka spruce.

Back to the main body cavity. The floor has been leveled and thinned down to its final thickness. The walls have been thinned down until I could flex them with one hand spanning the waist (the side walls are about 1/8 inch thick plus or minus). The front wall connecting to the neck has been left thicker to avoid the potential problem with citole number two. In citole two, when I thinned down the front wall to the same thickness as the others, I could actually flex the neck a bit. It hasn't yet affected the action on the instrument, but I decided I didn't want to take a chance with this one. Still, the whole block weighs less than a pound at this point. The cherry is definitely much lighter than the maple. A little sanding cleanup is necessary at the edges where you can still see the chisel marks as I cleaned up the floor around the newly thinned walls. I honestly have no idea what the dark flecks are. They randomly appear in the wood as paper-thin bits - they aren't knots. There is one knot in the body, a little off center in the widest portion of the back area. You can just make it out in the picture.

Time now to start the actual assembly. This is the bracing bar that goes underneath the widest portion of the soundboard, just off the location of the bridge. It is made from red cedar, and is shaped like an upside-down T in cross-section. First it must be glued to the underside of the soundboard before the soundboard is attached to the main body.

The start of the fingerboard. It has been cut to shape and thinned down to appropriate thickness. Once I get a clean measurement of the nut to bridge position on the basic body (block and soundboard), I'll add the frets to it.

The tailpiece, cut to shape and thinned down to final thickness. This one is not like the rebec or fiddle tails in that it is perfectly flat, not arched. The holes will be drilled once I have the body together and can space everything cleanly.

Starting the actual assembly now. The first piece on is the brace for the soundboard. Back to using my handweight method to attach this to the soundboard. The attached piece is shown next.

Attaching the soundboard to the body. Again with the trusty handweights, this was lined up very carefully and glued down. The next picture shows the closed body as I'm fitting the fingerboard for trimming.

The fingerboard is next. The frets are made by taking a thin sheet and functionally turning it into a comb by cutting slots in it, and then cutting off the teeth. The teeth then become the square frets. The fret distances are determined by a fret calculator, such as this one at the Manchester Guitar Tech, though there are others. I used a 13 7/8 inch scale here. The slots are cut first with a fret saw, and then a square file is used to broaden the cut into a V shape. The frets are then laid into the slots and glued in place one at a time. Once all the frets are placed and dry, the overhanging edges are trimmed off using a coping saw, and the edges are beveled inward. In the previous instrument I used constrasting wood for the frets, this time I decided to keep it monochrome, as it were, and used the same wood from which the fretboard was made.

Last bit of actual carving done on the dog's head to finish off the features, and clean up the shape. This took several reference pictures of greyhounds to get something akin to correct. And yes, they really do have that line ridge all the way down their skulls.

The carving done, the fingerboard is attached to the body in the typical hand-weight clamping method and let dry. Both the bottom of the fingerboard and the neck of the instrument are given some skuffing so that the glue has a place to hold, and so that it is less likely to slide around as it is drying.

Once the fingerboard is dry, the final sanding and shaping of the body is done. This takes quite a while, and is probably the most tedious portion of the whole instrument making process. I start off with the carbide files, and work down to very fine sandpaper. This is about halfway through the process here. Once in place, the frets are also flattened using a fine grit long flat file to level them, and remove any sharp edges that might cut into the gut strings. The micro files are also used to straighten the edges a bit, and to remove any glue that might have gotten onto the fingerboard proper.

All the sanding done, the finishing is added. In this case, I used a rubbed oil finish. Three coats of linseed oil were applied and rubbed and cleaned between each application. This brings out the rich color of the wood (the cherry turned a very nice golden red color, which probably explains its brittleness - the board already had aged some, I think, before I acquired it). It is hung from its peg holes inbetween coats in a well ventilated area. Linseed oil doesn't run the risk of dust settling into the finish like varnishes or laquers, but is EXTREMELY flamable, and requires very good venting to keep from buring (rags saturated in oil have been known to spontaneously combust as the oil vaporizes off of them) or simply getting way too toxic.

The body is now done. Final reaming for the pegs is done to fit the pegs very precisely. I used unmodified rosewood violin pegs on this one as they matched the color of the fingerboard and other fitting almost exactly. The bridge and nut are lowered and slotted for the strings, and adjusted until the action is satisfactory.

The finished instrument, from top, 3/4 view, bottom and close-up of the dog-head on the pegbox. Overall I'm satisfied with it, and the pegbox was not nearly as annoying to do as I imagined it would be. It presently is with its new owners!

CITOLE NUMBER FOUR
This one is a requested design, based more on the Cantiga style, using older celtic geometric patterns as the carved decorations. The basic layout design is below:
Showing top and bottom view. This one will have a tail trefoil with loop much like the dog-headed one above. . The idea here is to carve the instrument out of maple (like citole one), but to have a Spanish cedar soundboard. The back geometric design will be carved into the body, and there will also be a carved geometric design down the sides of the instrument, as in citole one. The top will have an edge binding, and the intention at this point is to have an inset ivory rosette, though I am presently having a hard time finding another piece of ivory large enough.

It will also have a carved pegbox with an animal head, only this time the animal will be a lion, based roughly on Celtic designs.

The rosette will be carved into a knotwork pattern, based on a knotwork from the Book of Kells. The idea was to have it echo somewhat the diamond and circle pattern that appears on the back of the instrument.

So we begin. This is a nice, resonent piece of 2" thick eastern maple that is already somewhat aged, having been in the house now for at least a year (this was the backup piece for Citole #3 originally). One of the most common questions I get whenever people look at Citole one is "How long did it take you to make that?" While I randomly guess at least several hundred hours, I actually couldn't give people a known figure. So one of the things I decided to do with this one is to actually calculate the amount of time it takes to do each step. Here we've drawn the pattern carefully onto the wood. The centerline has been marked (and will continually be re-marked to maintain it clearly as we go along), and the area to be drilled out eventually gridded. Total time under an hour.

The first wave of cutting. This is done with the larger manual saw - not done extremely exactly, more just a gross removal of wood. The maple is again rather harder than the cherrywood, and is a little difficult to saw through. Total sawing time was about five hours, spread out over a couple of nights (as my arm fatigues after about an hour).

The body cavity clearing is started by drilling a bunch of holes with a 1/2" bit. Like before (see above) I used the "stopper" method to keep from drilling too deeply, but otherwise all this is done with a hand drill (power, but not a drill press). The drilling itself took about an hour or so, but had to be done over an evening's time, as the drill starts to overheat if used too continuously. The maple is, as already noted, fairly hard and the drill really has to work to get through it. I also learned (from working on the other citoles) that it's easier to carve out the cavity before cutting the outer walls close - it makes the wood stronger for the harder chisel hacking that has to be done to clear the cavity, and gives a little possible leeway should a mistake occur.

Starting the "hacking out" of the body cavity, using the scoop chisel and a mallet. The maple clears slower than the cherry, but still cut pretty quickly.

Finished the first pass of clearing out the body cavity, all done with the simple scoop chisel and mallet. This took a total of about four hours. Now need to take the smaller chisels (and potentially the dremel) to smooth out the walls and basically level the floor. Neither will be finally finished until the outside carving is done, as the thicknessing will be done from the inside.

Was finally (after much searching, as many of my regular sources have dried up) able to secure a piece of ivory for the rosette. This nice BIG piece came from Cue Components, which sells billard cue making supplies. Seemed an odd source, but they were very helpful, rather inexpensive, and very quick. Took about 1/2 hour to transfer the pattern from paper to the ivory and clean it up for drilling. Obviously I have enough on this one piece to probably make another rosette!

The drilling has been done on the rosette - this took about two hours with the dremel drill-press. Lots of little holes (no, I haven't counted). The two holes off to the side were tests to prep lining up the depth and targeting of the little press so I didn't damage the primary pattern.

About another two or three hours of chipping away (carefully) at the larger spaces with the mini-chisels has basically opened up the large spaces. The smaller spaces will then be done with the micro-chisels, and then all of them cleaned up with the mini-files. The ivory color is actually pretty white - it tends to look creamy or almost brown because of the slightly odd lightening of the photos, and to help make it more clear.

And another two hours or so have working with the micro-chisels opens up the remaining space. From here on out the rest of the work is done with the mini-files to shape the holes. After that the chisels come back to do the "knotworking" pattern.

About 10 more hours and we have the filing done, so the sillouette is complete. It has also been cut out (using a jeweler's saw) from the slab and the edges evened out with the files. All that remains here now is the over-under patterning and the ebony edging.

Back on the body block, the outer edge shape has been brought closely into line. This was done with two techniques - the first is to use a small saw to cut a series of notches and then to chip out the spaces between the notches (fairly quick, but risks cracking the wood). The closer work is done with simple small chisels - see below.

Cutting out the neck - start by lining it out, and then cutting a notch (two vertical cuts, with the inner space chipped out), and then using that slot to fit in the coping saw to undercut the rest.

Here you can see the technique of slowly chiseling down the surface of the sides to bring them to just the point I want. The chisels are still faster than filing it down, and throw a lot less dust in the air (since I mostly work on my living room floor, this is a fairly major consideration). You can also see here that the neck has been cut down by this point.

The body has now been fully roughed out on the outside. That took about eight hours of work. Next will be the cleanup of that, so I can do the decorative carving on the outer side of the body. Once that is down, the walls and floor will be thinned down from the inside. You can also see the sketch of the scrollhead on the block.

The sides, with a combination of chisels, files and the scrapers have been smoothed out, ready to have the drawings of the patterning done on them. This again took about 2-3 hours per side.

The tail trefoil is carved out into its more or less final form. Not finished - still need to final filing and sanding, but the shape is done.

Starting the shaping of the scrollbox. This sequence shows the rough steps I use to work it down (similar to what I did on the sides). Use a saw to slot the section, then a chisel to chisel out the sections between the slots, and then saw down the sides. The area for the lion head has been left large until I do the sculpture to see its exact dimensions.

The basic structural carving being done, I now start the surface detailing. Here the pattern has been drawn onto the back of the instrument.

About 3/4ths of the way done the back pattern. The initial line is "traced" with a sharp knife, creating an incision about 1/8 inch deep. Then a "V" channel is chipped out using the small chisels to either side of the line, and cleaned up with a V-chisel and the files. I tried on some scrap using the V-chisel directly on the line, but the changing direction of the grain, coupled especially with the sharp curves of the spiral design, made that very awkward, and I ended up with more mistakes than I could readily clean up. So went with this technique instead. After the full pattern is complete, there will be a double line done ringing the edge of the whole back, which will be then further edged with the ebony edge-binding.

The finished back carvings, though before the back has had a final scrapping/sanding. The sides have also been finished being prepped for having the designs drawn onto them, though still have to clean up the neck (which will be done once I've worked out the peghead design).

This is mostly an amusement image. I sometimes get comments about how people would like to do this kind of project, but don't have a good workshop like I supposedly have. Well, the simple truth is I do most of my work on my living room floor, usually while watching (or rather mostly listening to) television. It's a nice time to catch up on all those commentary tracks of the various DVD's I have. The 'table' is actually my wife's Rebok Step, which I plop down in front of and work away. My usual "live studio audience" as my wife puts it, consists of our pet rabbits, the male Apricot of which you can see in the background here (happily shreading the newspaper in his cage). Peebs (our female, on the other side of the room behind the camera from this angle) also likes to help by chewing on my projects, or most often chewing on the tools. Apparently there is nothing more fascinating to a rabbit than a fast moving hand saw cutting maple wood...

The side carvings will be a simple matrix of alternating diagonals, lined top and bottom with the ebony edge binding. Here is the design drawn out before worked onto the sides of the instrument. This pattern will run from the tailpiece to the tip of the wing on each side.

Slight reworking of the lionhead, based on a 14th century bronze aquamarile sculpture from the Cloisters in NYC. The person who this citole is for preferred a closed mouth lion to an open mouthed one. Not wildly different from the first idea, but probably in the end easier to carve, as I won't have to do the interior of the mouth.

The clay model of the lionhead, done to actual scale. As with the greyhound head, I find it easier to carve from a 3-D model rather than from 2-D sketches, so I make a scratch version of the carving in clay. Obviously the detail level is rough and the mane here is merely "suggested" rather than the actual mane, which will be a bit fuller (I just didn't feel like wasting time building up the full mane - was more concerned with the form of the head). The corners of the mouth will be cut more deeply in the wood, and at this point the intention is to inlay the eyes with ivory whites and ebony pupils.

Working on the neck and pegbox. This is the neck and pegbox now chiseled down into the appropriate block size. Next is rounding out the neck and drilling the peg holes.

The neck is then rounded and given a distal taper (narrows both side to side and top to bottom as it approaches the pegbox). The point where the neck joins the body is also smoothed out and made more crisp.

Next I turn to the pegbox. The basic guidelines are penciled in where the peg holes will be drilled, where the box will be hollowed, and the centerlines for the head. The double line at the base of the pegbox is where the nut will be going.

Starting off with the head, I penciled the block design for reference from the slightly smaller sculptural model.

Carving the headpiece. The right hand side shows where it will remain until I do the inlay for the eyes. Some final texturing and the mane will be detailed when I do the sanding and finishing pass after the pegbox has been completed. Next drilling the holes and carving out the box.

Marking where the peg holes will be. The spacing is taken from a traditional violin pegbox. Always makes me nervous, as I don't have a drill press, so I'm drilling straight by eyeballing it, which doesn't leave a lot of room for error.

But all turns out fine. Here is the finished pegbox, awaiting final sanding and surfacing. The hollowing channel has been carved out, and the sides thinned and straightened.

With the pegbox done, it's back to the main body cavity to thin out the walls in preparation for the fitting to the soundboard. Here you can see the chisel-work chopping happily away at the side.

Before finally thinning the walls down from the inside, I needed to do the outer decorative carving to verify how deep it would go. The design continues with the parallel line patterning done on the back. First the pattern is drawn on the side, the lines of the drawing are then cut into the wall. The lines are they chisel/chipped in so form a cross-section V cut. And the edging is finally cut. Then I ran a triangular small file through all the groves to smooth out as many irregularities as I could. This process is repeated on the other side. The design follows the curve of the body (so the grain is constantly changing direction, making the chiseling a little difficult). They do not "meet" in the back, as the tail trefoil interrupts the pattern. They are skewed a little higher than vertical center, as the soundboard will add a little thickness at the top.

The side carving done, the cavity walls can now be properly thinned down. The gross wood removal is done with the chisels, with the final pass (especially in the wings) using the dremel. The walls are thinned down to about 3/16th inch thickness (to allow for the cutting in of the sidewalls with the design). The floor has a little smoothing out yet to do, but that will done shortly.

Other bits coming together. The top image is the soundboard piece of cedar. It will end up a bit redder when any finish is applied. The lower piece is the bit of black (lots of glare in photo) ebony that will be the tailpiece, fingerboard, bridge, and nut.

The rough cuts of the fingerboard and tailpiece.

The fingerboard has to be thinned down. The very hard ebony wood is chiseled down (as the brightened photo here shows) and then planed and filed smooth again to about 3/16th inch thickness.

The fingerboard is then centerlined, and cut to more exact shape and length to fit the precise space of the neck of the instrument. (as you can see, this was done before the thinning of the walls)

I decided to use contrasting ivory for the frets and nut. This image shows the frets having been rough cut (from the piece in the upper right corner) and the chunk of ivory (old piano key rough) that will be used for the nut.

The vibrating string length will be 13.5 inches (34.3cm). Using the (now standard) six frets and the fret calculator (see above), this generates frets at 1.93cm, 3.74cm, 5.46cm, 7.08cm, 8.60cm and 10.05cm from the nut edge respectively. Next up will be to cut the grooves using the fret saw at those point, and then add in the frets.

The distances from the nut are carefully marked on the fingerboard, and starting slots cut into the piece with a fret saw (seen partially on the right). The slots are then widened into a deep V shape with files to admit the square cross-section frets (set into the fingerboard at a 45 degree angle, so that the cross section would like like a diamond).

The frets are then evened out using the files, and then set and glued into the slots. Overlapping end material is sawn off (using the fret saw), and thus we have the basic fretboard.

This is then fit and finally shaped to the actual neck of the instrument, and is ready to be glued into place.

Adding the edging ring around the rosette. A strip of ebony is soaked and steam bent into a circle just a hair smaller than the outer edge of the ivory rosette, and allowed to dry and set in that shape (see the mess on top). The ring is then glued together, the overlap scraped down to a skive joint, and the inner edge filed to just admit the ivory rosette, as shown here.

Working on the soundboard, the soundboard is rough cut to shape, and then thinned down to appropriate thickness using a planing tool (I've found that the scraper plane works better