You're such a fucking genius, dude.

Yeah, they ID'd 2 of the songs in my video. Orwellian shit. Jeez.

Regan> Well, it's the same guitar where a string snapped on its own two hours after recording the video. You'll have to wait until I replace them.

FINE.

Framing and focus are off, volume is low as hell. Sorry about that.

Oh, also the recording stopped in the middle of the last song.

But I abide by the rules. First take.

I look way more solemn and deep than I actually was (sleeping 3 hours the night before does not help); Still, one coule argue Midlake's Courage of Others is not the album to pick for cheerful singing. Oh well. I have some ideas for later uploads that'll balance things out.

I'm participating! Yay!

PS: I was not aware just how strong my head bob game was when I play the guitar.

Cutting

My 3D model allowed me to create templates directly. I printed them out in real size, stitched the different sheets together and proceeded to cut out the shapes with an utility knife...

...which I then transferred to the wood.

I borrowed a jig saw and a drill at work and launched myself into the noisy part of the project.

It's a rough cut, because 1/ it's hella difficult to be precise with these things and 2/ you need to keep extra material for the matching of the two parts of the body and the sanding.

Looks good, though. This is the point where it's starting to feel real. I'm actually doing this and not completely failing at it, for the moment.

The only problem I encountered was that one of the head top pieces split in two when I cut it. .2 inch is kinda thin and pine wood tends to split easily. I had to glue it back together. It's still resting for now, firmly held in place with medical tape.

Time to bring out the chisels and the gouges and the files!

First order of business - which I'd been looking for the most: carving out the rune soundhole. To do this, I first drilled out an opening along the interior of the rune with a Dremel and then widened it and detailed the angles with diamond files.

all done

Then I sculpted the curvature of the back of the body with a gouge:

Ready to glue!

Coming up with the design

I quickly came up with a basic design that drew inspiration from various tagelharpa I saw on the web. I did it in Maya straightaway to get a better idea of the volume:

Most of the basic elements were there: body, hollow upper part for the left-hand playing, tail block so the instrument has a "foot" and somewhere to tie the cord used to hold the tailpiece around (not yet designed here). I immediately incorporated the idea of breaking the symmetry of the instrument with a curved upper edge of the body. I wasn't really satisfied with the bulkiness of the whole thing though, and the aspect of the head which had too much of a Thor's hammer/stereotypical Viking imagery to it.

Following the approach I described earlier, I didn't have much interest in keeping a typical design that was found everywhere else. I wanted it to be mine...

Yes, Will, thank you.

...and I was strongly encouraged in that direction by a homemade tagelharpa I found on the web. A Norwegian guy called Espen Winther, with strong experience in carpentry and Norse reenactement, built a tagelharpa with a very unique look. He made it bigger than the usual size because he wanted a deeper sound (tuning it in D). Here's him playing it:

I love what he did. It's a beautiful work of art and the deeper tuning sounds amazing. Espen also posted a lot of pictures of the work in progress, and even a few videos giving advice on some aspects of making a tagelharpa. These would follow me for months as I tried to understand how he went about making his instrument.

The curved, boat-like aspect of his instrument felt like a good answer to the bulkiness I didn't really like in my first design and most of the tagelharpa I've seen. I made some drawings mixing different designs for various parts of the instruments until I approached something that felt elegant. The final drawing I did that would establish the design I kept was the following one. I remember I did it on my phone while on a train (not an easy exercise. Autodesk's Sketchbook app is really great, though. Look it up.):

I was really satisfied. Some things were to refine but I had the main idea. The inspiration from Espen's design was there but I felt I had really made something that was my own. I kept the upper edge asymmetrical because I still liked it that way, but it can also serve in balancing the weight to sit better in the playing position. I also had the idea to shape the soundhole as the Raido rune. I'm not a metaphysical nor a superstitious person, but I've come to enjoy creating my own personal spirituality. The attraction I feel for the Raido rune started with Wardruna's song Raido, which is my favorite of all and reaches very deep into myself. It's one of the few songs in the world that could be described as... the sonic representation of my vision of nature. I'm not that knowledgeable in ancient runic alphabets but putting it in my instrument felt right. Sometimes, you gotta let go of your rational self, y'know? It's one of my main quests as a photographer and artist.

I also originally intended to put two soundholes at the bottom which I then shaped into what's known as shield knots, though it has more to do with Celtic symbolism than Norse (which are very much tied together). I proceeded to model all this in Maya:

This process was the longest, as I tried lots of things to really refine my design. I believe I finished it around late May. Since the drawing, my design got basically an 80% scale horizontally, the two necks got thinner and I precisely modeled and put into place the various pieces that were missing. The only things I kept basic were the tuning pegs, which would have been too long to sculpt precisely in 3D. I only needed them to be there.

I finally did a quick texturing to get a more realistic idea of it, and had a bit of fun with it because why not.

the tuning pegs have gone on a trip to Belize on this one apparently

This design hasn't changed since, although I've decided to drop the two soundholes at the bottom for now as I was told one should be cautious about letting the sound escape the cavity too much. I was not very comfortable with the difficulty making it would represent anyway, and I rather like the simplicity and harmony without it. I'll see if the central hole is enough.

I wish I could find harmonics as easily as Regan at least makes it look like it is.

Yes. Absolutely. Cherry-Garrard gives a brief account of it in his introduction, and it took me a while to make the connection: the ships that got lost during the Franklin expeditions are the ones that were used by Ross' expedition to the South Pole in 1839, namely HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.

I wouldn't. They died.

Y'all beautiful peeps.

I had yet to post one of mine, and it so happens that a friend shot a picture I rather liked last week during an intense two-day shooting for a musician (who also happens to be one of my best friends). Which might explain why I look hella tired. Still like it.

(© Aude C.)

(I'm the one with the camera and the long hair - going through a phase. Don't know where it's going yet.)

(also the girl on the right is Suzie, my girlfriend.)

PS: bgi is my spirit animal, visually.

EDIT: I'd like to state for the record that this post here was my 1,000th. Well, I care somewhat.

An account of the 1910-1913 English expedition of the Terra Nova to the South Pole by one of its youngest members, Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

I think it's best summed up by its very first sentence:

"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."

The expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, is famous for being the first to reach the pole... I mean, second. A Norwegian expedition led by Amundsen preceded them by 34 days. It's also famous for its return trip, which utterly went south (pun intended). No member of the small party that reached the pole survived, including Scott himself.

It's a long and difficult read - the brief introduction by the author is almost 50 pages and a bit strange, as the author describes the whole expedition in a summarized way, only to expand on it in the rest of the book. He does, however, give a recap of the history of arctic and antarctic discoveries, starting with Cook. The writing style is that of the 1920s, which means complex sentence structures and uncommon vocabulary; all in all, a good exercise for a non english-born dude such as myself.

It is, however, absolutely fascinating. I've grown passionate about distant and hostile lands such as the Antarctic or the Kerguelen Islands, even nowadays places only populated with scientists who live dangerous and extraordinary adventures to go there, in the sole purpose of learning about stuff. The Terra Nova expedition happening in the beginning of the 20th century, takes place in an epoch where technology and scientific knowledge was infinitely more limited than now. The whole thing is told in a way that only emphasizes how passionate about discovery and scientific enlightening every member of the expedition was, never backing off from the many hardships they encountered.

A tale of heroism that is of the same nature as the one I've found in mountaineering pioneers; one that is described by french mountaineer Lionel Terray as conquistadors of the useless, one that lives outside the realms of competition between nations that motivates the very governments that commission them, but that could be summarized by the answer another french mountaineer, Gaston Rébuffat gives to the question "Why do we climb mountains?": "because they're there".

Translated extract from a french magazine:

I'm completely stunned by the notion that there is so little connection made between episodes, that a trilogy is now nothing more than three separate stories told by different people who hope something holds together in the end. This is such a mess. He's glad the second episode of the trilogy he's making the other two episodes for, hasn't derailed his plans. He might as well be talking about a competitor, but no, he's referring to a part of the same fucking story he's working on.

I can't wrap my head around this. TV shows have seldom reached that level of fucked-up Frankensteinery. Storytelling is dead.

Checks out