Unusual Covers

[thatguy]

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

Annie Hurdy Gurdy
Thunderstruck 

[King Bob]

TG has a hurdy-gurdy...

[Drunk Monk]

Really?

That might pair well with a theramin.

[King Bob]

His father made it. I seem to remember him saying it needed some repair work. While his father was an excellent woodworker, he was not a luthier.

[Drunk Monk]

Yes, ship models are different than musical instruments, right?

Luthier. Good word. KB FTW.

[King Bob]

There is a lot of arcane knowledge involved.

FYI, the word luthier comes from the word lute (of course), which comes from the word oud, which is still the name of the instrument in Arabic. (It is slightly different from the lute in that it is fretless. The lute has tied on frets, as does the viola da gamba.) DM, you may have seen Hamza el Din play the oud. When the lute faded away after the development of the guitar, the word lingered on. It does not refer to makers of harps since they are constructed differently.

TG's father also made a Celtic harp. It was beautiful.

[Drunk Monk]

You are a font of arcane knowledge and I salute you for that.

[King Bob]

Probably why I wanted to go into academia; it's about the only place it's useful. Except for the crossword. And the Spellling Bee.

[thatguy]

I recently watched "Rustin" on Netflix and was surprised that there was a bit where he actually picked up the lute that was sitting in the background of his apartment scenes and played a song. I guess the '60s was a the big lute comeback period.

My dad made several instruments:

A wooden tongue drum: https://coolpercussion.com/wooden-tongue...roduction/
A mountain/Appalachian dulcimer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_dulcimer
A sheitholzt (a relative of the mountain dulcimer): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheitholt
A hurdy-gurdy (currently on loan to my friend John Thomas): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurdy-gurdy
A hammered dulcimer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammered_dulcimer
A celtic harp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_harp

...each instrument was a one-off, so the learnings from one project didn't necessarily improve the next project.

One day, the hammered dulcimer tore itself apart due to the tension on the strings vs the strength of the glue. I have all the parts, so it might be repairable, but it always seemed like a bitch to tune...

Likewise with the Celtic Harp. Too many strings...it just sits in a corner and looks pretty. 

The mountian dulcimer and the sheitholzt hang on the wall by my mom's front door. They aren't really tunable/playable. They use friction pegs and don't like to stay in tune and micro-adjustments are super hard. I have a $5 cardboard mountain dulcimer that has tuning gears and it plays much better. Side note: my folks wouldn't buy a guitar for me when I wanted to take lessons unless I learned and could perform a song on that mountain dulcimer my dad made. I learned how to play "Go Tell Aunt Rhoady".

I took the tongue drum on a camping trip with Boy Scouts one time and kids were banging on it with branches and wrecked the top finish pretty good. I think when my kids were little, one of them dropped a crayon inside. I have never been able to get it out. I currently use it as a computer monitor stand on my desk at home.

Also, my dad helped me significantly when I made my own electric guitar. 

--tg

[Greg]

Didn't Sting do a whole album of lute songs and then do a tour of those songs?

[King Bob]

Yes. I had some hopes for that but they were dashed. Everyone sings renaissance songs like it's opera. I thought he would sing them in a normal voice, but he didn't. I think there might be some good songs from the era that are ruined by the performance style.

Joni Mitchell played the dulcimer a lot and wrote some of her earlier songs on it, then altered her guitar tunings for them.

I saw a baroque harp on Antiques Roadshow once. It was not playable and the musical instrument guy said that's always the case because the tension tears them apart.


On a slightly different note, I was thinking about this old folk song maybe best known from Joan Baez or Dolly Parton. Here's Roger McGuinn, with a little of that 8 Miles High thing in the solos.

[thatguy]

I think that weird guitar tuning I came up with: DADAAE (KB, you might remember me playing it from time to time in the Number Nine days) might be partially unconsciously because of that mountain dulcimer experience...

The only other time I've heard someone else use that tuning is this song (which is about 10 years later than Number Nine) :



--tg

[King Bob]

Since I never could play the guitar more than slightly, I was always baffled by the alternate tunings.

Along those lines, it seems that the ultimate instrument for you would be the pedal steel, since it's got two open tuned necks and you can shift some stings with the pedals

[King Bob]

Since DM mentioned this as his favorite Dylan song