13 course swan-neck

This Baroque lute has a string lengths of 720 mm for the fingerboard and 980 mm for the long strings and is tuned in D minor (A=415).

It is after the Johann Christian Hoffmann 13 course lute kept in the Horniman Museum in London, and is a very good well preserved example of the sort of swan-neck lute Hoffmann made around 1740 in Leipzig. I spent a lot of time visiting the original instrument at the Horniman Museum, who commissioned me to do a full size drawing of it. The process helped me to get to know the instrument well, not only through many measurements but the character and style of the instrument.