Bowed Keyboard #1: Wheelharp: my first attempt at trying to simulate bowed strings with a keyboard

This is a little more detailed look at a project I posted a while back, the wheelharp…I am sorry to rehash it, but there were a few folks who inquired about some more details, and I had not had a chance to find my old pictures until today. Sorry to pester everyone else!

Have you ever had a thought, and wondered if it has been done before?

Several years ago, I was adjusting my hurdy gurdy, which is an instrument invented in the middle ages that uses a rosined wheel to bow the strings. There are usually 4 to 6 strings that are constantly in contact with the wheel- 2 to play the tune, and the rest are drones, giving it a sound very similar to bagpipes. This particular hurdy gurdy was built from plans from “musicmakers” kits in MN, using 1/8” plywood, and some leftover paneling from someones remodeling project. The keyboard buttons and tuning keys are made from a junked oak pallet…but this is another story/project.

I had all of the strings shimed so as to not make contact all at once. (it’s a lot easier to find the screeching string without all of them blaring) as I lowered the strings one at a time into the wheel, I thought how great it would be to have a full scale, and lower only the string you wanted into the wheel.

At first, I envisioned a small instrument not much bigger than a hurdy gurdy. After figuring out the space needed for key hardware, I realized this was not going to be something you could pack around easily…might as well put some legs on it to hold it up.

I started with the wheel. This is the most central element of this type of instrument- If it does not function well, neither will the rest of the instrument. I started thinking of ways to place the strings around the wheel in a way that would allow them to make contact easily. The normal hurdy gurdy configuration soon went out the window; a flat soundboard would make for a really tall bridge with lots of pressure and unequal distance from the soundboard to the strings. I soon settled on a barrel shape.

Up until this point, I had never seen anything remotely like this instrument. As fate would have it, during a trip to play hurdy gurdy, a friend loaned me an encycopedia of musical instruments. Low and behold, I found the geigenwerk…an instrument invented in the 1500’s in Germany. It looked nothing like what I had planned- It was based on a harpsichord and used 4 or 5 small wheels instead of one large wheel, but the idea was the same. A quick web search when I got home turned up a harpsichord builder in Japan, Akio Obuchi, who had interest in this subject as well, and had built a reconstruction of the geigenwerk. After exchanging a few e-mails and getting some ideas from Akio on how to move the string into the wheel without a lot of bulky mechanical garbage, I started to make the sawdust fly.

The first things I made were the bow wheel, the flywheel for the treadle, and the legs. I did a lot of the proportioning at this stage by holding my hands in the air over an imaginary instrument and getting a “feel” for where things seemed natural, then marking a stick, a wall, or whatever was handy to record my scientific, pecisely arived at, measurement…

Next, I built a lightweight frame for the two tubes that would serve as soundboards and resonators. I made within this frame smaller cylinders with drum heads on them to couple with the soundboard via a soundpost, but I don’t think it actually added a lot of volume to the thing. I actually tried several variations of these resonators- aluminum membranes, slinkys, anything I thought might increase the resonance. I did get some neat thunder like effects!

I’ll stop for now, but in the next installment, will show the plywood shell getting wrapped around the frame and standing it up on it’s own 4 legs. Hopefully soon I will also be posting progress on a new instrument of similar design.

Till next time….

-- Jon