Hi Domenico,

On 6 February 2017 at 02:53, Domenico Statuto <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>
> But I have a lot of doubts: will I be able to make a fretted clavichord
> with all the cranked keyboard and tangent position and so on? I read the
> Hubert has some complicated way of guiding the keys...
> On the other side, is the Silbermann a good-sounding instrument? I find it
> has a very small soundboard, isn’t it detrimental to the tone?
>
>
​I am by no means a clavichord expert, but I did build a magnificent Hass
five octave instrument, after the one in Edinburgh. Looking at photos of
the Silbermann, the soundboard area is about the same. Although the
soundboard appears small, it produces a lot of tone, as far as clavichords
go. It's interesting that there don't seem to be many big five octave and
five octave plus instruments - like the late Swedish ones - with
significantly larger soundboards. I assume this is because people must have
tried it and found there was not much difference in power output,
especially since the power input is low to begin with. I think the desire
to keep the instrument overall relatively manageable for domestic settings
was important.

If you consider a harpsichord, the actual sounding area of the soundboard
is really only a long strip running on each side of the bridges, not the
whole wing shaped visible area. Harpsichords in effect have a much smaller
active working area than it appears. Similarly with these large
clavichords. There's hardly any wood there, but they make a perfectly
usable sound.

I have observed that the small fretted instruments are very often louder
than the big clavs, despite their smaller size. One advantage of the big
five octave ones is they make a good writing desk too.

Andrew

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