Portfolio: Hurdy-Gurdy, 1975

Hurdy-Gurdy, 1975

French polish finish

That peach wood is from a tree in my folks' yard. It's chromatic - there are two rows of keys. The tops are the sharps & flats, and the bottoms are the diatonic scale. Four strings - one goes across the wheel, which gets worked by the keys, and the others are drone strings. They can be either taken on or off the wheel, to have an option of one to three drones. The crank handle brass, keys -- everything is all hand-made. The "flags" are a friction fit into the keys, so that they can be turned to fine-tune the intonation. Play at your own risk.