This is my first Renaissance Guitar build and a really different challenge for me. We know very little about how these instruments were constructed, but we do know they were very popular, and quite a lot of music survives. We know that the Renaissance Guitar had 4-courses of strings with the lower courses in pairs and the top string a single string. And know that it was commonly tuned from low to high Gg/CC/EE/A. I based my instrument on measurements of another modern builder’s recreation of a Renaissance Guitar (owned by a friend), bits of lute-making practice that could be applied, and my intuition.
The woods used are Mahogany (back, sides and neck), Lutz Spruce (top), Boxwood (tuning pegs), and Macassar Ebony (head plate, fingerboard, and bridge). The rosette is laser-cut in Cherry from Gamut Music in Duluth, MN.
