Baltimore Recorders.org

About the Rackett

Racketts were double reed instruments of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. They are remarkable for their small size and low register. A tenor rackett is less than a foot tall, and it can play down to C. This feat is accomplished by having a narrow bore, as small as six mm, and by winding the bore around the instrument.

Renaissance racketts, such as the one shown to the right, have the reed mounted at the top of the instrument on a brass staple. A pirouette is usually present, which surrounds the staple and part of the reed, and may have been used to help support the lips while playing. Renaissance racketts have cylindrical bores that are divided into nine sections. The first section runs vertically through the center of the instrument. The eight subsequent sections are arranged concentrically around the first section, as is illustrated in the diagram. The end of one section connects to the beginning of the next, forming one long tube. These instruments have twelve fingerholes, which may be covered with the tips and middle joints of the fingers. Hollow brass tubes are connected to some of these holes and extend past the body of the instrument. These have alternatively been made of bone. These are added for ergonomic reasons and make the instrument easier to hold. Praetorius describes four sizes of racketts. Descants, whose lowest note is G, tenors whose lowest note is C, basses whose lowest note is F, and great basses whose lowest note is D or C.

There are only a few extant Renaissance racketts. The Kunst Historisches Museum in Wein has two instruments made from ivory. They are labeled as ranket, and may be viewed at the following link: two ivory rankets. They are 12 cm in length and 5 cm in width. Museum für Musikinstrumente der Universität Leipzig has an instrument made from ivory. It is cataloged as inventory number 1414 and may be viewed at the following link: Alt-Tenor-Pirouetterackett. It measures 12 cm in length. The total length of the bore is 103 cm. It was believed to have been created between 1645-1655.

The Bate Collection at the University of Oxford has two racketts. They are numbers 384 and 389, Racket and Bass racket. I head read that they were believed to be from the Renaissance. However it is now clear that they were created in the twentieth century. The following link shows number 389: Bass rackett. It has two ivory tubes. Number 384 is displayed here: Rackett. It is much smaller than 389. Its body is only approximately 20 cm in length.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a 19th century instrument owned by Galpin. It is an alto rackett in the style of a Renaissance rackett from the early 17th century.

I was recently contacted by someone who requested a fingering chart for a Renaissance rackett. Although I have a Baroque rackett and fingering chart handy, I did not have a Renaissance, as they belong to other members of the group. I constructed the following chart from my memory of the instrument. Other accidentals are possible with forked fingerings, such as are used on e-flat. They tend to be out of tune and quieter than the other notes. This fingering chart is for a basset in F. Similar fingerings are used on other size Renaissance racketts.

Renaissance Rackett Fingering Chart

Baroque racketts mount the reed on bocal, as was done on a bassoon. Although Baroque racketts have cylindrical bores, each bore is slightly larger than the previous one, thus producing a pseudo conical bore. They also arrange the bores differently in the instrument, as is shown in the diagram. The bore terminates in a bell like that of a bassoon.

A technical drawing of the baroque rackett in the Haags Gemeentemuseum is available from the museum. The instrument was made by an anonymous maker in the Netherlands around the year 1700. The drawing was made by Jan Bouterse in 1996. The instrument is identified as No. Ea 65-x-1952.

There is an extant instrument by J. C. Denner. It is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. The inventory number is MI528. It is 18 cm tall with ten toneholes. It has its original bocal, but is missing the bell. There is another rackett by Denner in Vienna with an ivory bell.

Over the past decade people have begun to explore 3d printing instruments. The rackett has been no exception to this trend. To my knowledge the first person to report on such an endeavor is Andrew Lu. He writes about this project on the following page: Causing a Rackett If you are interested in 3d printing one, I recommend that you contact him. He was very friendly and helpful to me.

Someone visited our group who was interested in making racketts. We have also periodically been contacted via e-mail by someone interested in making one. This was wonderful, as there are too few people creating instruments. Given that people are repeatedly contacting us about this, it is high time that I post some more information on creating a rackett. I will be posting information to this page over time.

One question that comes up over and over again in creating instruments is where to put the fingerholes. Rather than provide a template for fingerholes, I will describe a method of creating them, thus rather than giving you a fish, I will teach you how to fish. Fingerhole placement is not a simple matter. It depends on the diameter of the bore of the instrument, the size of the fingerhole, the thickness of the wall, how many covered holes are on the instrument, the roughness of the bore, and many other factors. Even for simple cases such a cylindrical instruments, mathematical models can be lacking.

We will begin with the most simple of mathematical models, which has been applied to strings for more than two thousand years. It will address the desired length of the instrument for a given pitch. The purpose of this is to obtain very approximate locations of fingerholes, which can then be further refined. We know from the ancient Greeks that a length of string that is half as long as another string, and both being under equal tension, will produce a pitch that is an octave higher than the pitch produced by the longer string. Various proportions have been known since antiquity. The following table contains the proportions for Pythagorean temperament.

Now that we have this data, we can map it onto the length of the rackett. This is displayed in the image below.

There are problems with the layout that I chose. Some of the holes are positioned on the links between the bores. This is undesirable. Thus, one would have to use a different proportion of bore length to bore distance.

We will now consider how to modify the position of these points in relation to the position of the fingerholes themselves. Renaissance racketts typically have 11 fingerholes. There are four holes on the front right side of the instrument when you face it. These are covered with the four fingers of the left hand. There are five on the front left side, and these are covered by the four fingers of the right hand, and the upper most hole is covered by the medial section of the index finger on the right hand. There are two holes on the back. The holes on the back are covered by the thumbs.

Now the first thing that you will notice is that the holes on the rackett do not correspond to the points we calculated. The holes are drilled into the instrument at various angles, and sometimes into other bores. In our simple model, the points represented the length of the instrument. However, musicians are well aware of forked fingerings. The finger that is closing a hole, even when there are intermediate holes that are open, serves to lower the pitch. Thus, placing a finger hole at one of those points would put the hole in the wrong place. The holes have to be further up the body of the instrument to account for the fact that an open fingerhole is not equivalent to having an instrument of the length up to the point where the hole is open. There are also many other factors at play. An important one is the thickness of the wall of the instrument (or the length of the hole between the bore and the outside air.) The thicker the wall, the further down the bore the hole need to be placed.

Some empiricism. Once the instrument is complete, but does not yet have fingerholes, take it and play a note. Find its fundamental frequency. Write it down. Take numerous measurements and record them. If all has gone well, the instrument is lower in pitch than is intended. If this is the case, drill a hole that is approximately 3 mm in diameter into the ninth section of the bore, near its end. Find the new fundamental frequency. You now have a very important piece of data, the effect on the frequency of the instrument (its effective length) of drilling a hole that is a given distance from the end of the length of the instrument. Hopefully you are still a good bit flat. If so, you can create another hole, further up the bore. You will create a function to transform the empirical data from your instrument to the expected position identified above.

The rule of thumb is to place the fingerholes further down the instrument than expected. The hole can be enlarged with a file or drillbit, or drilled at an angle further up the bore to raise the pitch. It is more difficult to lower the pitch. The hole can be filled in with beeswax. If it was close it can be rebored with a smaller diameter. If it was not close, a new hole can be drilled.

Work your way up the instrument from the lowest pitch to the highest. Once a hole has been drilled and it is at the correct pitch, recheck the pitch on the lower holes. Once all the holes have been drilled, go back again and fine tune the diameter of the holes.