Mechanical Reverb

If you listen to the recordings in the previous two posts, The Works of God and Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire, you may notice some reverb on the lyre... but, there's no post production reverb there at all (or any other effects aside from a little compression).

As you can see in the picture, there's a spring mounted inside the lyre's sound box. One end is attached under the bass foot of the bridge. The other end is attached to the back. This causes a vibration in the back mediated by the spring - in other words, reverb.

Thanks to Shane Speal for showing me this technique.

The works of God...

Still thinking about what kind of music can be played on an instrument limited to six notes like my new lyre.

Well, the ancient Greeks - back in Homer's time - played a 4 string lyre. Earlier Mycenean Greeks seem to have borrowed the Sumerian 7 note scale, but the Iron age Greeks wiped it out from Greece. Then Pythagoras borrowed it from the Sumerins (or Assyrians by that time) again, and we still use it today.

But the four string lyre Greeks didn't write much about music theory, so we really don't know what they played on it.

OTOH, some African musics still use a 4 string lyre. I haven't actually heard African 4 string lyre music, but often, African musicians use their string instruments almost like a drum to set up a groove under their singing.

So, I thought I'd try this with my 6 string lyre.

Here's a Yoruba song I learned from Ken Porter in Boston (who accompanies himself on drum when he sings it): Ishe Oluwa Koleba Jeo (128 kps mp3). The title is the entire lyric and means "The works of God cannot be destroyed.

Lyre Lyre pants on fire...

Rebekah recently opened a new pressed flower art shop in a Sanford flea market - and while there helping her set up, I found a six-in-line guitar tuner set (probably half of a 12-string set) in one of her neighbor's shop.

That inspired me to build a Hutton Soo style lyre from a cigar box. (The pic is an early test assembly - before the pyrography was done.)

Our friend Robin wasn't familiar with the word "Lyre" when I showed it to her - so she chanted "liar liar pants on fire" while laughing at the word... Rachel (Rebekah's daughter) said, "you should use that for the pyrography." I had been planning something else, but the pants-on-fire idea was better.

Now all I needed was to come up with some music that could be played with only 6 notes.

Well, the Sutton Hoo lyre was medieval - so I borrowed a medieval dance form, the Estampie, and wrote Nova Stamfo Unua (128 kps mp3).