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Post by joshua on Mar 27, 2015 18:20:25 GMT
Hello, so I've been looking into the guqin, and I have some questions. What are the rope decorations on the bottom for/represent? In what hertz does it tune? Are there any guqin instruction books in English that you know of? If there are no English books, I'll probably go with the guzheng , but I'd prefer guqin. Thanks
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DavidNguyen
Intermediate
Plays the Shamisen and is looking into Vietnamese Ken, and Dan Nguyet. Also interested in Pipa
Posts: 42 
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Post by DavidNguyen on Apr 10, 2015 2:31:05 GMT
I believe Guqin is usually tuned to A 440. There are many different scales to tune the Guqin to though, many of them can be found on Wikipedia, and while most tutorials will tell you to use Harmonic tuning, but you can use an electronic tuner if you prefer. There are also many books on Guqin, some in english. You may want to look into the textbook titled "Standards of the Guqin" and also, there are plenty of internet tutorials. In fact, the author of "Standards of the Guqin" has tutorials on youtube. For the rope decorations, if you're talking about the ropes on the tuning pegs, those aren't decoration. If you're talking about an actual rope/tassel decoration, it may have no representation. If it has a knot, then that knot should represent something. I hope I was helpful
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Post by Charlie Huang on Jun 16, 2015 21:05:07 GMT
1. The rope decorations are called 'rong kou' and are made of twisted (silk) thread. Twisting the tuning pegs tightens and contracts them thereby pulling the string, tightening and raising their pitch.
2. As the above, A440 though this is modern practice. In the past, one can tune to any pitch they want provide the note relations between the seven strings are correct. The only time you;d want to tune to exact pitches is for duets.
3. There is. Standards of Guqin by Juni Yeung. You can google it. Other than that there is Lieberman's translation of the Mei'an Qinpu but that is both out of print and not really complete by qin teaching standards. There are also websites in English that give you basic instructions for beginning qin plus the Guqin group on Facebook for quick answers to queries (this forum is a ghost town when it comes to qin I'm afraid; hence my extreme delay in replying!)
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