Ugears Hurdy-Gurdy build

My partner got me this 'build your own' Hurdy-gurdy for xmas. It comes in a bunch of laser cut wooden sheets, which you pop out and assemble. I enjoyed the build - the instructions were easy enough to follow.

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There was also a small wooden hammer to assemble to help with the build - ironically, I needed a hammer to assemble the hammer, so bit of a problem there. :-)

The instrument has two strings - one is a drone, the other is played by pressing in the keys to fret the string.

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Of course I couldn't resist making it an electric DIY Hurdy-gurdy. So I hot glued a small piezo on the inside of the lid. At this point I had no idea whether it would work or not, so didn't have high expectations for the thing to make any sound at all, let alone work through an amp.

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All up I think it was probably 3 or 4 hours assembly time, which resulted in a playable instrument.

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I stuffed up when threading one of the strings - it threaded through part of the frame and I didn't notice. When trying to tune it, it ended up just crushing part of the mechanism. Whoops. Managed to get it all undone and rethreaded, without too much swearing. Well... maybe just enough swearing.

How does it sound? Better than I expected, but I wasn't expecting much! The scale is a bit weird, with 6 keys and an open string, the top two notes being flat. The sound is generated by turning the wheel, which rubs the strings, so it's a constant sound (like a bagpipe), with strings. Not the most pleasant sound to my ears.

As for running it through an amp? It works. It does pick up every knock and bump on the case, and it's quite noisy as you have to rotate the handle constantly to get noise on the strings, and that adds to the noise on the pickups. The whole instrument acts as a microphone, which I didn't expect - you can't play it sitting in front of the speaker, as you get feedback real quick.

I tried it out with a bunch of guitar pedals, and found that any sort of distortion or fuzz just didn't do much - it's a pretty rough sound already. Tremolo, flanger and chorus type effects were interesting. Delay was actually kinda nice, as it was audible when playing notes on the hurdy-gurdy (but not useful for a drone string). My favourite was probably an auto-wah effect, used with short turns of the hurdy-gurdy handle (not how it's supposed to be played). That had me laughing so hard it hurt.

So, overall, a fun present, which I enjoyed building, and had a laugh playing so far.