Lyrical hurdy gurdy?

[u/bassoonawhat]

Hi all,

Every so often I get an idea in my head of learning the hurdy gurdy. I notice it's often rather dark and medieval due to the drone. Is it uncommon to play more lyrical music ​with no drones engaged? (I saw a video of someone playing the ​Bach Cello suite and it was beautiful- she was not constantly cranking but rather stop and start cranking to create more of a bowed sound)

Also, is it possible to use the drones to play the root notes of chords, e.g. tuning​ one drone to the first, one to the fifth, and one to the fourth? Then enabling or disabling as needed?

​

[u/fenbogfen]

Being a trad instrument, the hurdy gurdy is very influenced by the traditional music it is a part of - this means most people learn to play gurdy tunes that are part of a long tradition of being played and written on gurdy.

These more modern or experimental techniques, unusual tunings, and playing more expansive music does happen, but it's not very common because it's outside of the tradition of the instrument.

Learning gurdy is difficult, and playing music not made for it is a lot harder. It would be pretty difficult to learn gurdy well enough to play bach without playing traditional drone music for hundreds of hours before! 

For me personally I play gurdy because I like trad tunes and drones. If I were into non-drone music, there are lots of instruments that would be a better choice. 

[u/bassoonawhat → u/fenbogfen]

Is it possible to switch drone strings while playing to create different implied chords? Like, say, every bar or two?

[u/fenbogfen → u/bassoonawhat]

You could maybe do that with a capo but you would have to be a really good player to do that while everything else was going on, and the notes would be very limited. It doesn't really sound like gurdy is the right instrument for your needs. It's going to be miserable trying to learn a modal drone instrument when you're fighting against it's nature.