Monochord

[eller]

For anyone who thought the Scheitholt looked a bit too complicated... This is a monochord, the simplest imaginable zither. Dad built that a few years ago.



I didn't even know about its existence because it was in Dad's collection of homemade musical instruments. (He said it was stored "right next to his selfmade xylophone", which is an instrument I don't touch. Ever.) Maybe, at some point, we should make a proper inventary within the family, considering I own some instruments that surprised Dad, and clearly, he didn't always inform me about his crafting projects... LOL. (Granted, we own a sh*tload of questionable instruments, most of which aren't considered instruments by civilized people in the first place, so, it's hard to keep track...)

Comments

[eller]

Cool! :D I mean, obviously, I have no idea how to read that, but I'm entirely unsurprised they developed their own notations.

[yhlee]

I can't either - I'm guessing you "only" need to know a limited set of Chinese characters (= hanja in the Korean example) but the guqin textbook has like a dozen pages of required characters and their meanings that you just have to memorize - of course you have to do the same with Italian terminology in classical Western music anyway. XD I would not be surprised if the Korean notation was at least somewhat based on the Chinese example, but I don't actually know that for sure.

[eller]

I'm afraid reading about the guqin has only convinced me I never want to be anywhere near a guqin... It's super scary! XDDD

[yhlee]

Also the cost. A new one goes from like $300 for a beginner instrument on up (and up and up, I'm sure). But yeah, those people are so deadly serious about the guqin I would be terrified to try.

I also discovered that for some reason, if you search "chord zither" on eBay, along with a bunch of German chord zithers, you also get a ton of hits for...the Korean gayageum - which is a zither, but it's much more similar to a koto or guzheng or guqin.

[eller]

"A new one goes from like $300 for a beginner instrument on up (and up and up, I'm sure)."

That sounds perfectly reasonable, actually. It's not as if other instruments are cheaper, unless you really make do with firewood.

"those people are so deadly serious about the guqin I would be terrified to try"

Same. I'm not actually a bad zither player - as in, yes, I'm perfectly aware of the different types of touch with which you can achieve different sounds, I can do that - but, these guys have different names for each of those methods and are deadly serious about when and how you're allowed to use them?!? Scary. I'm quite sure an actual guqin player would wish me dead after hearing, like, three notes. (Or less.)