The hurdy-gurdy is one of Europe's oldest musical instruments. A kind of mechanical violin, it uses keys and a crank, along with melody and drone strings. Some call it the medieval synthesizer, and a ...

Twenty-seven years ago, in search of a hurdy-gurdy master, Donald Heller wandered into a music shop in Budapest. There, he saw a beautiful maiden, an ancient-looking stringed instrument in her lap, ...

It’s a throwback to vintage optical instruments, a decidedly fringe strain of music-making pioneered by Edwin Emil Welte’s Light-Tone Organ in 1936 and realized within the consumer market as the ...

Ever heard of the hurdy-gurdy? “When I saw the hurdy-gurdy, it blew my mind,” says Peter Micholic. “It looked so alien compared to the other instruments I was familiar with, and I couldn't believe ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The hurdy-gurdy is the duck-billed platypus of instruments. It has strings but you don’t pick or strum them. It ...

If you’re looking for a long journey into the wonderful world of instrument hacking, [Arty Farty Guitars] is six parts into a seven part series on hacking an existing guitar into a ...

The only difference was, bagpipes usually sound like a polyphonic assembly while this sound seems like a lone voice shrewdly culled from such an assembly, singled out, groomed up and presented to us ...

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory ...

It never hurts to iterate the phrase “Op-Ed” at the beginning of articles in this section. It may help us (in this case, I) remember that the writer is not an encyclopedia or – to be more current – ...