Hark! I Hear The Harpsichord Eternal
Last night I spoke to an old friend, one of those rare creatures who has built a harpsichord from a kit. It has been a long haul, but now the thing is really, finally (almost) finished. He waxed rhapsodic on the veneer he chose, a cross-cut mahogany (did I remember that right?) with 3-D qualities. That is, the color and reflective properties are view-angle dependent. Me, I just want to play the thing. He said the dampers need a bit of adjustment, which made me chuckle. If your personality runs anywhere near the perfectionist end of the continuum, beware: the various parts of a harpsichord offer an infinite number of opportunities for tweaking, tuning, repairing, improving, sanding, polishing, adjusting, and tightening.
In fact, I'm working on a design for a new kind of advanced harpsichord, one that can play an infinite gradations of dynamics. Get this: it actually has little felt hammers that strike the strings instead of plucking them. Of course, a problem with this is that you have to play very short notes, otherwise the hammers press against the strings, dampening them. I suppose what I need to do next is come up with some kind of mechanism that will cause the hammer to spring back even if the key remains depressed.
Anyway, the prototype is sitting in my basement right now, next to my boat and my Rubens. For now I'm calling it a "Soft Loud." I don't mean to brag, but I really think this thing could end up replacing the harpsichord as the dominant keyboard instrument.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
2 Comments:
Perhaps you could add electric pickups to the string posts, that could give a boost to the volume. I think the chicks would really dig that.
Your SoftLoud is indeed a brilliant idea, but who are you going to get to play it? People have spent their lives developing touch and techniques for the harpsichord (in fact, that great French composer Couperin wrote a whole entire book on "The Art of Touching the Clavecin" (well, you know how weird the French are about naming things).
Your idea of a mechanism in the key simply won't work. You'd have to push keys with the strength of an Atlas. And how could you possibly play fast notes or trills?
Well, maybe it might serve as an ostinato instrument for choirs. But then, we already have organs for that.
Nice idea, but thoroughly impractical.
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