Being a musician since primary school, I always took interest in diverse musical instruments.
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon this video by Rob
Scallon,
which talked about the Hurdy Gurdy, a european medieval string instrument, precursor to the church pipe
organ.
The sound of this instrument greatly peaked my interest, souding like a mix of violin, organ, bagpipes and
electric
guitar(in some circumstances) and people like Guillaume Desq only strengthened my will
to
try
one.
After doing some research, I realized that because this instrument is not very well-known,
a mid-tier Hurdy-Gurdy had to be hand-made by a craftsman(most likely in Europe, where it's more
popular) who had long waiting lists. Obviously, these instruments also have a significant cost(at
least to a student like me). I always had as a philosophy that given enough time, I can make
anything myself, and I therefore started looking for people who created one “DIY-style”. I found
some people on youtube which made simple version of one and found this website from where
my inspiration for the crank shaft came from. Winter break at university was around, and since I was looking
for something to do, I decided to give it a shot.
I am not well-versed in woodworking nor do I have the right tools to create a quality instrument(circular
saw, hand saw and a drill), the goal was to simply create a working prototype. I sadly do not have all
the build steps, given that I’m creating this website a week after finishing the keys(talked about later
in the page), however I took some low-quality pictures and recordings at the time so here they are:
There were a couple of problems with this first version. First is obviously the lack of keys,
which i didn’t plan to make since I thought it would be too difficult for me to create. To play
different notes, I simply pushed on a string with a sanded off junk piece of wood, which worked
very well to play one note, but is a bit of a hassle to make a melody. Second is I’ve strung it with
very old(~10 years) used violin strings, but of the three I’ve tried, only one didn’t break, and I
had to temporarly take the D string off my classical guitar to use as the drone string. But now
the guitar string is way too loud compared to the violin string which is supposed to play the
melody. Problems such as these two made me lose interest in the project for a while.
I often saw it gathering dust right next to my guitars over the course of the next 4 months and
decided to finally make some note keys for it at the beginning of the summer. After about 3
weekends, it was finally done and I could play a simple tune on it. I placed the keys to make a major scale:
I also tuned the guitar string lower to be an octave apart from the violin string, which made it
quieter because it has less tension/friction with the wheel. To finish it up, I ordered
some piezo disc on Amazon to be able to record/amplify the sound. I simply soldered two wires on
it and made a wooden female connector to be able to connect it using 1/4” jack cables. With some
trial and error, the best place to place the piezo pickup was underneath the bridge. Here is the
raw signal from the pickup:
I can't play it very well but here is also a video of the final thing. As you can hear in the raw audio, the
signal lacks in high frequencies
but has a lot of bass, while my camera's mic was exactly the opposite. I blended the two for the video, which is
more reprensentative of how it sounds in reality:
All in all, although far from a real Hurdy Gurdy, I’m very happy with the result given my beginner
knowledge of woodworking and the limited tools that I’ve got.
FM