How I started: my first cittern

      Early days

      I didn't plan to become an instrument builder when I made my first cittern in 1973. Several years earlier I’d bought a battered Portuguese Guitarra in a Leeds music shop. I didn’t know  how I could play it (and had never heard of Fado music) but it intrigued me. I tuned the six pairs to guitar intervals, but this didn’t work well. Only when Barry Dransfield borrowed it and removed two pairs, tuning the remaining four pairs mandolin style, did it start to make sense.
      When Andy Irvine visited in Newcastle, he dropped the first pair a tone to use as a drone. This was a revelation to me and showed how I could use it for song accompaniment.
      Around the same time, my wife Liz bought a locally built Appalachian dulcimer. It was nicely made but didn't play well, so mustering my limited woodworking skills, I made one myself. It worked out well and I built  more.

Right:   With Liz in the early 1970s. I'm holding the Portuguese Guitarra, Liz has the dulcimer that inspired me to start building.

     Tuned as Andy had shown me, I played the Guitarra in folk clubs throughout Britain. But its warm, soft tone didn’t carry well in the unamplified venues of the time and I knew it couldn’t be heard well at the back of many clubs.
     In around 1972 I bought a 1931 arch-top Martin C1 from a visiting American and fell in love with its rich, loud and slightly clangy sound. I’d already built several dulcimers by now and decided to try the much more demanding task of building a new Guitarra style instrument with a carved arch-top like the Martin. I also wanted the extra versatility of a longer neck, meaning I’d use a capo to get the Guitarra’s shorter scale.

Left:  The Black Gate, where Liz and I lived at this time. It was the gatehouse to the castle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We lived in a flat at the top, almost in the roof, and looked after a library and small museum occupying lower floors. The top room at the front was Jason's bedroom and it was there I built my cittern.

      Three months and two necks later, my instrument was finished. It had a Yellow Pine soundboard, Indian rosewood back and sides, a mahogany neck, and ebony fingerboard and bridge. I was very happy with it; I loved the sound and it could be heard at the back of crowded rooms in a way the Guitarra never could.
     It didn't have a name, but in a book on Renaissance instruments I found a whole chapter on teardrop shaped flat-back instruments, strung with pairs of metal strings, called citterns. The name now usually refers to a five course instrument, but citterns can in fact have any number of pairs of strings.
      So my instrument became a cittern.


Right:  Playing my first cittern in a British folk club sometime in the early 1970s. Clearly taken later than the first picture, I'd grown a beard in the meantime.

Photo Brad Warren

     My new cittern also attracted attention from other performers, some of whom asked where they could get one. I told them I could make them one.
     Over the next couple of years it became clear that my main interest was building rather than performing, and it dawned on me I'd found what I wanted to do with my life.
     I had become an instrument builder.




Left:  Now - the two instruments that inspired my first cittern. The guitar is now 80 years old. The Guitarra looked old when I bought it nearly fifty years ago.

Right:  Then - my first cittern. It looks amateurish now but was wonderful at the time.