Well, by a weird twist of circumstance, I am here to tell you that a steel guitar IS a zither. Really.

I know this, and a lot of other more-or-less useless information because I did about two-thirds of a master's in musicology and I've read a bunch of books and articles on organology, the study and classification of musical instruments. I neither defend this nor apologise for it, but there it is.

For the scientific-type organologist, a stringed instrument with a neck is a "lute" style instrument - includes the lute, but also your guitars, your banjos, your mandolins, your fiddles and cellos, and so on. An instrument that's basically a board with both ends of the string fastened to the sounding surface is a "zither" type. So this includes your zither proper, your autoharp (also called "idiot zither") ,a bunch of Asian instruments like the koto and the veena, and also your Appalachian dulcimer, your hammered dulcimer and I suppose in some sense your harpsichord and your piano.

Some zithers are played by plucking or hammering open strings only, and some have strings that are also stopped with the fingers, a little piece of wood, or, in our case, a polished steel bar.

There's a gray area, as the handle part becomes incorporated into the soundbox. A Hawaiaan guitar is a "lute", because it has a neck. A Weissenborn style guitar is a hybrid, because the "neck" has become an elongation of the soundbox. Any kind of console steel has become a "board zither".

(If you think about it, a Weissenborn guitar is structurally closer to an Appalachian dulcimer than it is to a regular guitar.)

Anyone who's played these instruments knows there's a difference in sound as both ends of the string excite the main vibrating body, even if it's a solidbody instrument. That's also why a squareneck sounds different than a roundneck, and a Weissenborn sounds different than a flattop.

Thanks for your time, fellow zitherists.

[This message was edited by John Kavanagh on 24 December 2002 at 09:47 AM.]

As all little boys would do, I improvised and got a battery out of a flashlight and now you know the rest of the story.....

I idolized my father when he played and he would sometimes say: Vait until you hear the glochenspiel. But I never heard one or at least never recognized the sound.

Years later I asked Bobbe Seymour what those little bells were on one of his recordings. He replied that it was his guitar through a Protheous (SP??) with a glochenspiel selected. I finally got to hear one....

quote:

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Glockenspiel: percussion, musical instrument, consisting of a series of metal bars tuned to a chromatic scale and mounted in two rows. It is played by a pair of knobbed beaters and produces a high-pitched, bell-like sound. Its range is two and a half to three octaves. Military and marching bands use a portable form called a bell lyre, in which the bars are mounted on an upright frame shaped like a lyre. The orchestral glockenspiel is played horizontally and can be equipped with a keyboard, allowing the player to produce chords.

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You can see I didn't do my homework.