The Instruments

Below are illustrations of the types of renaissance instruments we play: loud wind instruments like the shawm, curtal, rauschfeife, cornett, sackbutt and some types of bagpipe quiet winds like the recorder, flute, crumhorn, rackett and other types of bagpipe, stringed instruments such as the guitar, cittern, hurdy-gurdy and harp, and assorted percussion instruments.

Shawms Double-reed instruments, the ancestors of the modern oboe and cor anglais; wide conical bore, hence very loud	Curtal or Dulcian Double-reed and double-bored instrument, the ancestor of the modern bassoon; conical bore, quite loud
Rauschfeife Wind-capped shawm with wide flaring conical bore; the loudest of the reed instruments	Great English bagpipes Loud double-reeded chanter and two single-reeded drones
Cornish bagpipes Early sixteenth century bagpipe, with two chanters and no separate drone, with moderate volume	Leicestershire smallpipes Quiet indoor bagpipes with a chanter and a single drone
Crumhorns Quiet wind-capped shawms with narrow parallel bore	Racketts Narrow, multiple-bored instruments played with controlled double reed; quite quiet
Flutes Cylindrical bored and keyless transverse or German flutes	Recorders Wide-bored recorders; known at the time as the English or common flute
Cornett or cornetto A "hybrid" instruments with a trumpet-type mouthpiece and fingering like a woodwind instrument; considered in the Renaissance and early Baroque to be the instrument resembling most closely the humen voice	Sackbutt With a narrow bore and smaller bell than a modern trombone, but otherwise very similar
Cittern A flat-backed, wire-strung instrument with re-entrant tuning	Guitar A small guitar with four or five courses of gut strings
Hurdy-gurdy A mechanical violin, with a wheel vibrating the strings, two melody strings played by pressing key-operated tangents onto the strings to alter the note, and several fixed-pitch drone strings	Tabor Skin-headed, double-headed drum played with sticks
Spanish cross-strung harp A chromatic harp with two rows of strings, one diatonic row and the other providing the intermediate semitones	Italian triple harp The Italian solution to making the harp chromatic; has three rows of strings, the outer two diatonic and the middle row providing the additional semitones
Nakers A pair of small kettle-drums worn on a belt around the waist and played with two sticks; one drum usually has a snare	String drum A tuned percussion instrument, with two sets of strings a fifth apart, played with a single beater; traditionally played as accompaniment for a three-holed pipe