Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/14/behold-the-theorbo-an-enormou.html
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She shreds like a boss on that thing.
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https://youtu.be/9X2Y4VCa3qE?t=124 Sting playing Theorbo
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She is just so, so good. I’m sick!
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…Pazazzy!
A number of years ago, I was walking along one of the main streets in Toronto, on an early Sunday morning, and music was blaring out of a large pickup truck, and I thought “Damn these kids and their crumhorns and psalteries!” Yes; they were rockin’ out medieval and renaissance music.
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I really can’t believe the crap she got after the Newport Folk Festival.
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I’m guessing the second neck needed to be so long because they didn’t have the technology for making the thick strings we use on bass guitars today (and maybe that the tension of those strings would have been too much for a neck to handle back then.)
The piano would have been developed shortly after the theorbo too, so this was a way to get more expressive than the very staid harpsichord.
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Like a 17th century boss, so, shreds like an arch duke? A countess, p’raps?
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Yes, indeedy. The first metal-wound strings (over gut) were just being developed as well experimentation with heavy salts being added to the gut for weight but the longer length to the second pegbox insured a strong beefy tone.
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This is the kind of thing a Bard-barian would wield to battle in a D&D campaign.
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Close! That’s an archlute. The theorbo has the top two strings tuned an octave low (called re-entrant tuning. A uke has a re-entrant string in the bass). Notice LK’s instrument is hellabig–you’d never get the top strings in gut up that high.
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She mentions they were trying to make the lute louder for use in opera. There was a kind of ‘arms race’ among US guitar makers in the early 20th century, all trying to make the guitar louder for use in swing orchestras, before the introduction of amplification. First came the invention of the archtop by Gibson, which had better projection than standard flat-tops, then Gibson, Epiphone and Stromberg all introduced archtop models of increasingly larger sizes, one after another. Some of which (Freddie Green’s Stromberg for example) were so big, and had such heavy strings that they were really only suited for rhythm accompaniment, not soloing.
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Interesting to see all of those modern instruments 
My preference is for the Renaissance instruments: http://www.piffaro.com.
“People complain a lot about the space that I take up”, says Lutenist Elizabeth Kenny
Still okay, Elizabeth, as long as the comments came only after you started playing the lute (and wonderfully, at that).
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I love the folks in Piffaro - have performed with them a few times. As for the theorbo, it is a regular fixture in orchestras that specialize in performing baroque music, so if you want to hear one live, many of the groups on this list fit the bill:
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and I thought that carrying my baritone sax case to school was a pain.
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Pretty sure the lute’s regular size, and the lady is just really, really small.
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Or side by side with a guitar and cut down on the competition!
