All Rotola Links

The Blogger search engine seems unable to find all of the rotola construction posts reliably, so I'm collecting the links here for easy access.  

A note to those who have not seen the initial posts:  I originally called this instrument a "vionola," and I have changed the titles of the first few posts to reflect its final name.  

Design (early Jan 2021)

The Pinblock (late Jan 2021)

More on the Pinblock, plus Soundboard Experiments (Mar 2021)

More on the Soundboard (Nov 2021)

Problems with the Soundboard (Jan 2023, 1st of 3)

Assembling the Soundboard and Drilling the Pinblock (Jan 2023, 2nd of 3)

The Nut (Jan 2023, 3rd of 3)

The Bridges and the Stand (early Nov 2023)

The Crank and the Bow (late Nov 2023)

Setup, Outcomes, and the Future (Dec 2023)

Initial conception to finished instrument took four years.  As acknowledged in the first Jan 2023 post, a year of that was spent experimenting with ways of steaming the soundboard sections into the shape I wanted.  Of the remaining time, my work on the instrument was very streaky, spending a week or two -- or even a day or two -- on it before other priorities superseded it for some while.  In the end, I finished it simply by returning to it over and over again.

I have some other, non-music-related, woodworking projects in my queue that I want to wrap up soon and then I hope to get started on a "full size" rotola, roughly 'cello scale.  As mentioned in the Dec 2023 post, there was a similar instrument made sometime before 2016 and I since discovered another one from May of 2024.  (The latter's builder has significantly further iterated his into something truly unique and wonderful, but very different from what I aim to do.)  How these instruments are used and played varies, but each one offers different solutions to the design's inherent problems and I hope to build on those insights.  Specifically, I intend the next instrument to have flat soundboards and the bridges will have one immobilized foot and the other mobile one will be centered on each soundboard; I believe this will alleviate at least some of the wolfing problems I had with the first one.  I want to have more strings, too; the first rotola was meant to have 16, but resolving the wolfing issue drove that down to ten.  With a larger instrument, I could imagine having even more than 16, but I now appreciate that each string requires a certain minimum width of soundboard surface to vibrate.  This leads to two approaches to design:  first, multiplying the number of desired strings by the minimum soundboard width to produce the instrument's circumference or, second, dividing a desired circumference by the minimum soundboard width to give the number of strings.  I also intend to experiment with string materials, especially trying nylon, gut, silk, and others to enrich the tone, as the steel strings on the first instrument make for a very bright voice.