If Slipknot were to ever add a tenth member, we hope it's a hurdy-gurdy player. YouTuber Michalina Malisz has repurposed five of the band's riffs on the hand crank folk instrument and it actually ...

Horns up for the hurdy-gurdy. The quirky Renaissance instrument proves it’s a match for heavy metal band, System of the Down. What happens when you combine a popular, boxy, Renaissance string ...

It’s hard to say for sure, but something special happens when an old instrument meets contemporary creativity. These aren’t ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...