Walter Zwiekhorst

This channel is meant to promote the theorbo and the baroque guitar. The instruments in the videos are a 14-course theorbo built by Stephen Barber and a 5 course baroque guitar built by Dirk De Hertogh.

Theorbos were developed during the late sixteenth century in Italy, inspired by the demand for extended bass range instruments for use in opera developed by the Florentine Camerata and new musical works utilising basso continuo, such as Giulio Caccini's two collections, Le nuove musiche (1602 and 1614).

The Baroque guitar (c. 1600–1750) is a string instrument with five courses of gut strings and moveable gut frets. The first (highest pitched) course sometimes used only a single string. The Baroque guitar replaced the Renaissance lute as the most common instrument found in the home. The earliest attestation of a five-stringed guitar comes from the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish book Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales by Juan Bermudo, published in 1555.