Actually, if you use the quill in a "historically correct" way, it will not
affect the thumb at all. Vladimir Ivanoff writes ("Invitation to the
fifteenth-century plectrum lute" in _Performance on Lute, Guitar, and
Vihuela_, ed. by Victor Coelho, Cambridge UP, 1977 -- p.9): "Numerous
iconographical documents show that until at least around 1450, the lute was
invariably plucked with a plectrum made from a bird's feather. Paintings and
drawings show that lutenists generally held the plectrum between the index
and middle fingers and plucked the strings with a shaking movement of the
forearm and wrist. . . . Numerous visual sources show that the transition
from plectrum to thumb-index technique took place between ca. 1460 and 1500.
Until ca. 1500 both techniques existed simultaneously."For what it's worth, when I took up the vihuela and lute a few years ago, I could not do much with the thumb-inside technique due to several previous injuries to my right hand. However, the thumb-outside technique is very comfortable, and scale work is fluent and natural-feeling. Michael Fink [EMAIL PROTECTED] To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
