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on the instrument was very streaky, spending a week or two -- or even a day or two -- on it before other priorities superseded it for some while.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.  

Of Sorcerers and Psychologists

I have been rereading some of the fantasy books from my adolescence, like Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer and, most recently, the Earthsea books of Ursula K. Le Guin.  They are balms for me, worlds living within others’ minds, Tolkien’s heirs and aspirants who explore the problems of our own world through characters removed enough from ourselves to allow us to tolerate the author holding a light to our own foibles and paucities.  Spending my days in a similar exercise with tangibly real people in their inescapably real lives, it perhaps seems ironic that this should be a relief and oasis to me, but it is.  

These books have me thinking about how I have always loved the idea of wizards and their kind, people who can use words to change the world directly.  From my childhood, I was convinced that there were mysterious forces at work in the universe that could be called forth and made use of, if one knew the right words and could generate the right intention.  When I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons – way back in 1976, as a freshman in high school – my first character could only ever have been a wizard, or magic-user, as they were called in the game at the time.  

Obviously, I’m not the only one with this fascination.  I’m no anthropologist, but my experience of other cultures suggests that this belief – that special words can change the world in a direct way – is universal.  East and West, technological and hunter-gatherer, Northern or Southern hemispheres, every people I’ve been exposed to has stories about persons who can use language to manipulate their environments.  In some places, these persons and their powers are taken as facts, while in others they might be merely entertaining tales, but this idea, that the world is affected by, even made of, words appears everywhere.  

I think this is not an accident.  We grant language tremendous power.  How many times have you heard someone say – or said yourself – “he made me do that,” meaning that he said something to you that you believed forced you to a given action.  A child comes crying to a caregiver because another child called them a name, or you feel your heart bloom when someone you care for says they love you.  With all the power we give to and rely upon from language, it’s not a stretch to imagine conjuring something corporeal just by speaking, nor to be fascinated by the prospect.  But we know that this is not really a thing; there is no “abracadabra” that actually manifests a rabbit nor curse that precipitates death.  

And yet, trained scientist and confirmed atheist that I am, I have come to believe in a certain kind of word-magic:  because of the power we give to language, we can change our lives through words.  Indeed, that is how I understand Freud’s great contribution, that talking can literally heal.  It’s not saying “abracadabra” and a rabbit jumps out of someone’s top hat; it’s more like saying, “how might you think about this thing differently” and the person you’re speaking with suddenly feels free of decades of burden.  This is the deep joy of psychotherapy:  witnessing someone’s world change because they have discovered language that seemed hidden to them.  We can tell a person “secret” stories – stories that aren’t actually secrets at all, just never told to them – and watching how, from those stories, new universes unfold before and within them.  

In the real world, it’s rare that such moments actually occur suddenly; abrupt enlightenment occurs only after long preparation, like the near-instantaneous emulsification of mayonnaise coming only after slowly and patiently dribbling oil into whipping egg, or finally topping a wall after long days of hauling stone to build a staircase up it.  But that front-loaded psychotherapeutic work itself occurs in language:  building trust, sharing vocabulary, distinguishing old ideas and introducing and refining new ones.  Yes, language does change worlds – individuals’ worlds – and the way it does so feels magical to me.  

It seems almost inevitable that I became a psychologist, and a psychotherapist in particular, because words have always felt magical to me.  When I was young, I struggled to make them work for me as easily as they appeared to work for others and it seemed like there was a secret that others, initiates, withheld from me, uninitiated.  Paradoxically, this led me to invest long and deeply in words, understanding them, learning how better to use them to connect with others.  Today, as I approach the commencement of my 65th year, I feel that I have some understanding and appreciation of the power of language and it is my joy to share that magic with others.