This page documents my collaboration with instrument maker Luca Bartocciolli of Caius Guitars in designing and building an experimental instrument.
- idea for an inlay design marking harmonic nodes 2-8 -
- representation of the 22-note per octave "sruti" system of India, and its harmonic origins -
(and how this might look on a single string, and on three strings)
- using a combination of the above ideas, a design for a fretless fingerboard -
- sruti (22 note) demarcated by circles on the left, just intonation (12 note) demarcated by circles on the right,
harmonic markings down center line -
(drawings below made by Miles Okazaki on Adobe Illustrator)
- my drawing of the fingerboard on a piece of ebony -
- some ideas for a body shape, using circles based on the harmonic distances within string length -
- Luca cutting a piece of maple -
- in order to visualize the natural proportions of a string instrument, I made some graph paper based on the harmonic circles -
Click to Download PDF of this paper
- a new design (based on Luca's sketch on the graph paper) -
- a cardboard cutout of the body shape -
- a simplified (more practical) fingerboard, with new body and headstock -
- redundancies removed from sruti circles and harmonic inlays -
- side of neck shows the chromatic scale in equal temperament (left) and just intonation (right) -
. . . to be continued
