On Sep 30, 2009, at 3:18 PM, Seth Appel wrote: > I am a business man and > not am musician... > ...it escapes > me why there are not cheap but OK lutes in the marketplace.
Sure, there are 300 dollar Yamaha CG's hanging on the walls of every music store in the civilized world. But that's because there's a large market for the cheap guitars among the folks who just want to try out the guitar, or try guitar lessons for their kids. Another reason why there's not much of a market for cheap lutes is that lutes are very delicate instruments and don't hold up very well under the not-so-tender ministrations of guitar players' fingernails and "classical" technique. No-one, as far as I know, churns out cheap lutes that can take the punishment that cheap guitars can. The lute world is all about those gorgeous paper-thin, light-as-air historical art copies, which are not really competitive in today's music business. Lutemakers don't take their instruments to the NAMM show; they go to the early-music seminar workshop venues. David Rastall dlu...@verizon.net www.rastallmusic.com -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
