The end ...

The last few entries have been catching up with things that have happened over the last 3 months.

Fast forward to the present day and it is May 6, 2011 - exactly 9 months since the harpsichord kit arrived on August 6 last year and I am going to declare it "finished" - for now at least ...

Overall I am very pleased with the instrument - the back 8' has a nice warm, clear, singing character to it and is, I think, already very close to where it should be - the front 8' is a little more incisive and, when played on it's own, the top octave is perhaps a little brittle - it will probably need more work but right now it just needs to be played for a while. The two voices combined blend very well together and produce a very satisfying effect.

Tuning appears to be quite stable with the caveat that this instrument does appear to be very sensitive to changes in humidity - much more so than the French double that is in the same room only a few feet away - a change of 5% relative humidity can shift the pitch of the Neapolitan by 15 cents while the double hardly seems to notice - even when this happens the instrument does stay pretty much in tune with itself and if you don't mind leaving it slightly sharp or flat you can get away with only touching up a few notes - on the other hand it is an extremely easy instrument to tune and a complete tuning doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes.

At the outset I did intend to keep track of exactly how much time I spent working on the instrument but I completely failed to do that. The one thing that I do know is that I spent at least as much time planing and thinking about the best way to do things as I spent actually working hands-on during the construction phase which lasted almost exactly 6 months. The last 3 months were all taken up with voicing and just playing the instrument. Construction could certainly have been done in much less than 6 months elapsed time - I had originally estimated about 4 months but I had some other commitments that took up more of my time than I had expected.

Anyway, here it is, alongside its larger and older cousin ...

Voicing 3

Once the stop lever for the back 8' was installed I had to make few adjustments to the voicing since the precise position of the register in the "on" position had changed very slightly - just enough to make 5 or 6 notes unreliable. In each case the plectrum was just slightly shorter than it needed to be and all that was required was to push the plectrum just slightly further through the tongue. I also had to adjust the dampers slightly so that they still damped the string when the register was moved into the "off" position.

Here you can see a close-up of some of the front 8' jacks before voicing. The register for the front 8' is in the "off" position and the plectra have already been cut to approximately the correct length so that they are clear of the strings.


This is what it looks like after voicing with the dampers in place. The front 8' register is now in the "on" position.

The last thing that needs to be done is to regulate the action to get the plucking order right. The two sets of jacks should pluck their respective strings at slightly different times when the key is depressed otherwise the touch will feel unpleasantly stiff and heavy when playing with both registers engaged. The back 8' has a natural tendency to pluck first because the angle at which the back of the key rises when the front of the key is pressed. The exact length of the plectrum also helps to determine the precise moment at which the pluck occurs and finally the length of the jacks can also be adjusted slightly if necessary.

I had tried to make the plectra for the front 8' just slightly longer than the ones for the back 8' and most of the notes were already plucking the strings in the correct order but in many cases they were still very close together and the touch was quite stiff. While I had done my best to get the jacks set up so that the spacing between the plectra and the strings was consistent there were a few of the back 8' jacks that were a little short - padding the bottom of the jacks with 4 or 5 thicknesses of masking tape brings the plectrum closer the string so that it plucks earlier. In a few places I also shortened the back 8' plectrum to get it to pluck sooner. Similarly with the front 8' shortening the jack increases the distance between the plectrum and the string and delays the pluck as does pushing just a little more of the plectrum through the tongue.

It took quite a while to get this right - at first I still had both jacks plucking much to close to each other and the touch was really stiff - you don't want the plucks to be too far apart but they do have to be quite distinct. Eventually I got a few notes to both sound and feel right and then it was easier to make the others behave the same way.