Erzlaute

Lute symbolism The lute frequently came to symbolise love and romance, lust and lasciviousness. Its delicate and fleeting sounds also reflected love's transience.

Like the theorbo, the archlute is a very large instrument, with a long neck and two peg boxes. The archlute's peg boxes are staggered at the end of the neck instead of one being off to the side, as with the theorbo. The archlute's tonal range is toward the tenor (like the lute), rather than the bass (like the theorbo).

The main differences between the archlute and the "baroque" lute of northern Europe are that the baroque lute has 11 to 13 courses, while the archlute typically has 14, and the tuning of the first six courses of the baroque lute outlines a d-minor chord, while the archlute preserves the tuning of the Renaissance lute, ...

A lute is a stringed musical instrument that surged to popularity in Renaissance Europe. It resembles a guitar but has a rounded back, a pear shape, courses (pairs) of strings and a long neck with a bent-back pegbox.

While the essential design of the instrument (six pairs of strings tuned in fourths, with a third in the middle) is similar to that of the modern guitar, the sound is very different: low-tension gut-stringing and the peculiar resonance of its pear-shaped body give the sound of the lute a delicacy and richness which ...

Secular music Secular music began including a wide array of musical instruments, such as lutes, recorders, the dulcimer, the lyre, and the rebec.

14-19 string A Lute (theorbo) - You can usually spot the difference between a theorbo and an archlute because a theorbo has half as many pegs and is single strung. Theorbos are essentially a single strung archlute tuned a tone higher.

Six pairs of strings extend above the gut-fretted fingerboard, while eight single bass strings are fastened into a second extended pegbox.

There were two versions of this instrument: one is the archlute – essentially a Renaissance lute with extra bass strings and which had the same time – the other is the theorbo (or chitarrone) which had a longer string length for the short strings.

On a stringed instrument, a break in an otherwise ascending (or descending) order of string pitches is known as a re-entry. A re-entrant tuning, therefore, is a tuning which does not order all the strings (or more properly the courses) from the lowest pitch to the highest pitch (or vice versa).

The words lute and oud possibly derive from Arabic al-ʿoud (العود - literally means "the wood"). It may refer to the wooden plectrum traditionally used for playing the oud, to the thin strips of wood used for the back, or to the wooden soundboard that distinguished it from similar instruments with skin-faced bodies.

The lute attracted the attention of the most accomplished musicians in its day, and so some of the repertoire is very hard, but at the same time, the simplest lute music can sound truly beautiful if played with a correct basic technique.