Stewart, The rose has no real effect on the sound except as it releases the enclosed sound chamber. That is an incorrect statement, but it is "close enough for government work". The guitar and most other "lute family" stringed instruments have merely the sound hol. But the lute does have a diffential thickness in the sound board that is relevant to the sound. The rose is normally cut into the solid soundboard which is braced according to that plan. The figures in the rose are irrelevant to the sound (except to the extent that they block the reflection out of the soundbox). But if you do a "glue in" you will be changing the vibrating characteristics of the sound board, and the lute. You can buy pre-cut roses from www.musikits.com, and you can set them by making a shoulder on the soundboard (and planing the pre-cut thin), or by making a ring for support and glueing it to the back of the soundboard to support the rose in a simple circular hole. But that latter approach (which I have used on other instruments) will change the stiffness of the soundboard at a sensitive point. I don't recommend it. Go to a woodcarver's site, you have more than a few in the UK (which I could name, but won't for the moment). Woodcarvers sites have chisels of 1/8th inch or less, and mildly curved gouges, that will be quite comfortable in making a rose from the raw soundboard. And after all, if you make a mistake, you can always make it into a simple circle. It is not the open area of the rose that gives the lute its sound, it is the fact of the opening that provides release of the echoing in the soundbox - and the local stiffness of the soundboard that is affected by the soundhole.
Best, Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stuart Walsh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 4:34 PM Subject: [LUTE] making a simple rose > I've dug out some old home-made instruments - small plucked things; very > simply made. I just cut out circular sound holes for them. > I did try carving inset roses and felt that a monkey on a typewriter > would be shoving out the entire corpus of Shakespeare's plays before I > got anywhere near making a rose. > > I'd just like to make a simple design I could glue in with supports. Any > ideas on materials, tools, techniques - a bodge job, as we say in > Britain - would be much appreciated. > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > >
