I'd like to make a correction. Apparently the issue of who done what first is a big deal in Italy, considering it arises from the era of competing city/states and all that. So I was digging around last night for more information about how they figure out which instrument makers actually invented which features, when apparently everybody was stealing ideas from each other with abandon. The instrument bidness has always been like that, though.
That guitar was made by a champion motorcycle racer named
Paul Bigsby in 1948. Anything look familiar?
I found
this amazing site about Gasparo da Sal?'s viola da Gamba, pictured previously in my prior post. (Yeah, I'm a Dumas. I didn't realize there was a whole page that went along with that picture.)
quote:Comparison of the f-holes of our tenor viol with one from a certified viola by Gasparo da Sal? confirm beyond all doubt the authorship of Gasparo da Sal?, thus indicating a date of origin of circa 1570. (Contrary to other cities, the labels in Brescian instruments rarely showed the date) The tenor viol will be analyzed dendrochronologically as soon as it arrives from France, where it has just been purchased.
Well, that pretty much nails it, I'd say. Can't beat dendrochronilogicalestificationary evidence. So I must correct the date I cited earlier, to 1570. The amazing thing is that for the past 446 years, nearly every violin, viola, cello and string bass made by any luthier anywhere in the world has had f-holes that looked exactly like that. Including all of the violins and cellos of Stradivarius, Amati, Guarneri, Stainer, etc.
Talk about getting it right the first time, huh?
Imagine in the year 2525, somebody saying the same thing about the Alembic bridge. You know it's gonna happen.
To give another perspective on where Gasparo was in his pursuit of the big thump, consider that his viola da Gamba was one of the largest instruments around at the time.
Here are two Italian experts fighting over his viola da Gamba, to give you an idea of the size. The winner gets to run the country for a week or something.
(The violone at the museum in Rome isn't much bigger.) It was only twenty years between Gasparo's viola da Gamba and the behemoth in the video, or the 5-string bass in the OP.
In the centuries that followed the viola da Gamba was replaced by the cello, which looks even more like a Gasparo da Sal? instrument, ironically.
At the time the Great Gaspy made that puppy, nobody made strings big enough for what he heard in his imagination, and friction pegs wouldn't hold them if they did. Nobody made a body with enough surface area for what he had in mind. And remember: he was known more for his playing than his instrument making skills during his lifetime, so he was driven to invent his own methods for making bigger strings than anybody had ever made before, and machines to secure the friction pegs, to anchor those strings across huge slabs of 300-year-old wood - by the same instinct that makes us want to strap on an Alembic and make the windows rattle. Gotta have that bass.
That's where it all started, and nobody had been there before.
quote:Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads! - Doc Brown
Did anybody else notice that the scrolls on the Great Gaspy's pegheads have an extra curl?
