DIY project: 10-string kantele

[.jon]

Note: this project contains no electronics

I'm taking a lutherie (craft of making string instruments) course at the local education center, and chose a 10-string kantele as my first build. Kantele is a traditional plucked string instrument, belonging to the genus zither. It has no fretboard, so it's note-per-string-simple. Designs vary from the small, traditional 5-11 string versions to huge and complex concert instruments, but they all share metal strings and wooden soundbox.

My final result will hopefully look something like this:



and sound a bit like this:


While the use of small kantele is nowadays quite limited to regional folk music, which I'm personally not that fond of, it's deeply rooted in our national heritage, and prominently featured in our national epic, the Kalevala. Yeah, the one that has inspired Shakespeare and Tolkien. I hope to apply some of this soul into my ambient works. I can't actually play one yet, but Väinämöinen, the hero deity, this boss looking dude here, does powerful magic with one he built from the jawbone of a giant pike:



and here by another artist, wielding his enchanted kantele for overwhelming response from the audience:



You know it's TUNE when the clothes come off.

It also happens to be a somewhat easy build compared to guitars, so it acts as a great entry to the challenging craft of instrument building and allows me to learn the correct methods without ruining an expensive set of rare wood

As giant pikes are rare these days, I'm using domestic wood sourced from the Fiskars region, purchased from the course instructor. He's an actual recognized master of the field and an experienced teacher, and the course so far has been an absolute blast. Well, "blast" at least as far as artisan woodworking with older fellas can be! Even though it's nominally a "course", there's only a few beginners each semester, and most of the others are regulars who've been building instruments under the master's guidance for years and even decades. And their works are astonishing to the point of being humbling- I'm not a newcomer to general woodworking, but the level of precision and attention to detail in luthiery is unlike anything else dealing with wood.

I'll write up a sort of a documentation of the process in the following posts, perhaps it could act as inspiration, or even offer a little bit of guidance for someone wanting to build one themselves.

[.jon]

The task for the first building session was to copy the design to a piece of scrap plywood, which will then act as a jig for the build. The design is a classic, conservative box kantele with metal string pegs. Small kantele can also be built by carving out of a single block of wood, but the box model saves tons of wood which is unfortunately a declining resource these days. Best wood is big and slow growth, properly cut and dried, while majority of our forests are basically accelerated-growth tree fields for the paper and construction industry. Some of the best instrument woods in the world are nearly extinct.

The frame/body pieces are alder, ponsi (the piece where the metal bar holding strings is attached to) and lapa (reinforcement piece for string pegs) are birch, and the top and bottom plates are European spruce. So, rather mundane wood species, but the alder I have is rather beautiful, and spruce is acoustically excellent sound box material, also used in violins.

This is where I am currently:



On the right side is the jig/model used as a drawing guide to cut the other parts. Expect for the bright piece of birch at the top, the rest of the parts are yet unprocessed, just roughly cut to size by the material provider. Here's a closer look at the birch piece:



That bird head shape, called noukka, is cut at a later stage for easier handling during construction. It has no acoustic purpose, more of a traditional decoration. I will improve this design in later builds, it could look much nicer, but didn't really have time to alter the traditional design for this one.

The cuts are first done with a bandsaw a few millimeters wider, then sanded precisely to the desired measure with a large belt sander. You could do these with hand tools as well, but since our course sessions are so short, using machines saves time.



Here you can see bottom part of the body after bandsaw, I still need to sand it down to exactly half of the pencil line width! The wedge-shaped leftover pieces are saved, they will come handy when clamping the frame down for gluing.

I hope to finish all the body parts during the next session.

[bftucker]

Your construction pictures seem to be missing but it "sounds" like a great project.

[.jon]

Thanks! I'm trying to link them from Google photos, and I can see them fine... but probably because I'm logged in on all my devices. Will fix.

[bftucker]

Thanks! I'm trying to link them from Google photos, and I can see them fine... but probably because I'm logged in on all my devices. Will fix.

Fixed!

[deastman]

This looks like an amazing project! I would love to get into woodworking- I did a little of it with my dad as a teenager- but power saws scare the bejeezus out of me. I’ve known several people with years of experience who had very serious accidents. Is there any way into this that doesn’t involve doing my own cutting on table and band saws?

[.jon]

Well, I don't think Antonio Stradivari had many electric power saws in his workshop, yet his violins are nearly as fine as my kantele

Seriously though, I think you could get the pieces cut and planed to approximate size for you by the supplier*, the final cuts I've done so far could have been made with hand tools. Like I mentioned, machines just speed up the process... but especially so with planing to get the pieces to correct thickness. Surface planing machines aren't overly dangerous though, but kinda big and expensive. But yes, I understand your feeling, power saws aren't toys and operating any such tools requires focus, paying attention to safety is literally vital.

* This depends on your country and location, but getting proper materials might actually be the difficult part.

[donkey tugger]

Interesting stuff and a cool choice of instrument. I have respect for anyone who can do stuff like this. I once tried to make a pencil case in woodwork at school - it didn't end well, the case losing out in a fight with a chisel.

[Jafo]

A physical model of the Karplus-Strong algo? Respect!

Seriously, I'm looking forward to how this turns out. May you and the universe achieve great things together.

[yellowmix]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

[ras.s]

Cool project! Not only cool that you've taken a course like that, but cool that you're sharing it with us and even greater than just sharing it is that you're documenting the process for yourself.

If you don't mind, I'll hijack this thread for a wee moment to show this sort of a kantele I built several years back. It's so unorthodox that it doesn't really deserve to be called a kantele, so I named it "tajukannel". "Kannel" is another name for kantele, and "taju" means consciousness or comprehension or something along those lines, and if the words are separated as "taju kannel" it means "consciousness on the deck", which is kind of a fitting name for it.

sound: tajukannel






It took me an afternoon to make it, largely because it's so damn simple and I quite literally cut every possible corner that I could. ;-)

The reason it's the way it is is that first of all, it's made from scraps. The box is made from recycled sauna seats (aspen -- it's common for kanteles). The soundboard dictated the dimensions, it's a left over piece of a cabinet that I made. The soundboard is elm, which is rather rare around these parts. What's particularly good about the soundboard is that it's cut with the side grain on top, and not only that it's thicker than necessary, but because it's cut like that it means that I'll be long gone before it starts to warp. Too bad it wasn't any wider, I would have loved having more strings on the thing.

Part of the reasoning behind making the contraption was that at the time, I had borrowed a kantele and played around with it and thought I'd make one myself.. But what I wanted it for was that I could easily carry it around, so I wanted the box itself to be the carrying case. The downside of that is of course that the soundboard isn't securely attached to the box, which then lends towards the board vibrating against the sides of the box. I typically play it in an upright position and I press it lightly with the palms of my hands which kills that resonance. Playing it upright is also kinda cool because the thing vibrates against my body and the soundhole is near my ear.

The odd shaped pieces in the middle of that second picture, they are supposed to be put together as stands to lift the board to the same level with the side of the box. The long strip of wood wedges the board in place. It's been several years that I've made it so the aspen sides have warped a bit, I should cut a slightly thicker piece of wood to serve as the wedge. The lid is just a piece of plywood (as is the bottom of the box) that slides in to a groove.

To add to the unorthodoxy, the strings are guitar strings, all wound instead of the typical steel wire that is used with kanteles. All of them are the same length (a little short of 50 cm) which isn't exactly wise, but with the length and with them being wound strings, they give the instrument a mid-range sound. The tuning pegs are probably the greatest testament to my laziness in this project (besides using a circular saw instead of a router to cut the grooves for the plywoods, as the groove extends all the way in to the dovetails on the sides of the box) -- not only did I cut, weld and grind them to shape and then threaded them, which is an awful lot of work for the stupidest idea of having what are basically screws functioning as tuning pegs (making them might not have been that lazy but the idea was). Another mind-boggling laziness here is that I didn't sand the area where the tuning pegs are, so there's still the bandsaw marks there.

The white piece in the last picture where the strings rest is a cut from a deer's thighbone. On the other end there's just a steel rod. I also experimented with having smaller bits of the bone under the strings at various locations, so as to split the string into two vibrating parts. It kind of worked but the strings are too short for that (and the small pieces are long lost).With the orange strap made of cloth, I managed to put wood, metal, bone and cloth in the same project (there's probably a bit of glue in as well, I don't remember).


While the wise old sage Väinämöinen might look at the thing with scorn, if he'd get a hold of it, I'm sure it would bring a smile to his face. If he returns from outer space with his brass boat, that is.. Because the strings are cramped in to such a small space, at times when I play them, they start resonating each other, which makes the instrument sort of sing on its own. The strings vibrating each other is the "taju" part in the name.

Because it's effectively a carrying case in itself, it serves the purpose I had in mind for it; it's a sort of prayer or meditation instrument for me that I can easily carry in to the forest or to the riverside. I've recorded it a couple of times but I've never made a full-blown tune with it. The box also fits an old style Hohner melodica and a chillum pipe, neither of which are ever bad to have around oneself. Having only six strings have proven a bit difficult though, as per what tuning do I use. Most of the time it's in the Ambasel scale (a pentatonic scale from Ethiopia) with the highest string doubling the root note.



For anyone interested in making the most rudimentary zither instrument, keep in mind that it all comes down to having a tuned string on a board. You don't really need heavy machinery to come up with something to play. Old kanteles were carved out from larger pieces of wood so that they didn't have bottoms; the echo box can be as simple as having a hollow piece of wood (or a box turned upside down) resting on a table. Even this thing makes a sound with just the board and the strings (without the box, that is) -- add a contact microphone to taste and that's it.



With all that said, .jon, your kantele is probably going to be a great piece of gear! A man needs to have a kantele, it's a must. Not only that yours will look like a real kantele but it will sound exactly like one as well. ;-) On top of those things, you'll gain experience for the next project. And I can't emphasise enough of how great it is that you're documenting it as you go, it's something I still fail to do myself on the stuff that I work on ..

Has the teacher shown a mathematical formula for the length of the strings? I'd like to make another one some time in the future and I'd like to have more strings (16 would probably be optimal) and a bit more traditional look. I know it's about not having to tighten them too much, only as much as is needed to reach the desired note, but I could use knowing a formula if you have one. How long are the strings going to be on yours?

[justin3am]

That looks like a fun project! It would be cool to install a piezo pickup near the sound hole, to make it an electric instrument.
I think Hink had built an auto-harp some years ago. I don't know if he documented the build process here or not.

Thanks ras.s, for sharing your pictures and your build experience. Since you used metal guitar strings, I wonder how it would sound when played with an ebow. Pretty awesome, I'd bet!

[.jon]

ras.s, tajukannel is awesome! Ja putosin tolle nimelle It sounds very nice indeed.

Thanks for posting your project, proves that there aren't any absolute rules when building an instrument for one's own use. I was going to build a kantele on my own this fall, but then I found about this course and decided that why not learn something new when there's this opportunity.

Aspen has a beautiful sound, but is soft so it calls for hard coating, and it's large spores pull inorganic materials from the earth, which blunts tools fast.

A man needs to have a kantele, it's a must.

It is known. I confess I felt an inexplicable urge to pass the rite of building one with my own hands, like our ancestors did. We Finns don't have many deep roots, so it's best to nurture the ones we can still reach.

Has the teacher shown a mathematical formula for the length of the strings? I'd like to make another one some time in the future and I'd like to have more strings (16 would probably be optimal) and a bit more traditional look. I know it's about not having to tighten them too much, only as much as is needed to reach the desired note, but I could use knowing a formula if you have one. How long are the strings going to be on yours?

I don't have that yet, and I missed yesterday's session due to illness (6 days of fever, sucked donkey balls), but I'll add that in this documentation once I have it. The longest string on mine is probably something like 550-ish mm? It depends a bit on the design I choose for the piece holding the varras.

That looks like a fun project! It would be cool to install a piezo pickup near the sound hole, to make it an electric instrument.

I have a preamped piezo already waiting to be installed! The next one I'll build will be slightly bigger and with pickups, maybe something like this:

http://www.ffholm.com/index4.php?page=k ... hkökannel2

Anyway, no update this week, I'm behind from schedule now but I hope to be cable to catch up quickly by doing some parts in my workshop.

[.jon]

Not much to update, last session was catching up by finishing some sanding, and preparing and gluing one piece in preparation of gluing of whole the frame next time. I received the top and bottom plates, the spruce bottom had apparently changed to a gorgeous piece of alder (Alnus glutinosa). I don't mind, it'll probably sound just fine and will look better.

I need to buy more clamps, it'll take 15 or so clamps to properly glue the frame! I'll post photos from the process, currently the whole thing is packed up for transport and no time to unwrap everything for beauty shots.

[Hink]

That looks like a fun project! It would be cool to install a piezo pickup near the sound hole, to make it an electric instrument.
I think Hink had built an auto-harp some years ago. I don't know if he documented the build process here or not.

Thanks ras.s, for sharing your pictures and your build experience. Since you used metal guitar strings, I wonder how it would sound when played with an ebow. Pretty awesome, I'd bet!

just saw this,I built a hammered dulcimer which also turned out to be pretty much the inspiration for this forum as I did document the build. Photobucket however now holds our photos hostage and any pics we shared online wont show up until we pay for what was a free service. I might be inclined to pay for the service if I knew the paid service worked better than the free which was slow and the pics went back where I put them.

Anyhow, here's the dulcimer...note piezo pick-ups, I also put two duncan woody's inside (that was a colossal waste of money but you can see them epoxied in there forever), the piezo are ok but really a pair of pencil condensers (I use Gauge mics) works the best. The sad truth is I'll probably never record this, haven't tuned in two moves but it does look nice.

What .jon built looks like a kantele, I have found kits for that but it's pretty simple to design. Nice job .jon, I would like one day to build one plus various psalteries and zithers.


these pics are when I first built it but before I tuned it and set it up, note the different position of the bridges. I did have it tune at one time and getting the bridges set so the note on the other side was right was tricky