Chiff and Fipple Forums

Hello! This is my first time posting on a forum like this, so I'm not totally sure if I'm doing this correctly.

I really want to start playing the Cwrth, but I'm not sure where to begin. I've already found one to purchase, but I want to get set up with a plan of how to learn before I go ahead and buy it. Does anyone have any tips or resources for learning? This is a super vague post so really anything helps!

Thanks!

Yep, you're doing it right.

I don't have a lot to offer. A Google search tells me that if you don't have a teacher, you might have to learn on your own; the crwth is, after all, a very niche instrument. YouTube might get you started by watching players, but social media stands to be more fruitful: who knows who you'll find out there? I was lightly looking at YouTube listings, and from one of the first was the misinformation that the crwth is an aerophone. Probably best to steer clear of that one.

I can't be 100% sure, but if you're not the very first crwthist (what's the proper Welsh word, Ben?) on this Board, you might be the second, and that's after several years. But good luck - maybe we have a crwth closet case lurking about.

Haha, thank you!

I'm also just trying to find out if it has a similar fingering to any other, more common instrument. But I haven't been able to find much yet.

elliskopchyyy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 17, 2023 6:26 pm I'm also just trying to find out if it has a similar fingering to any other, more common instrument.

Now we're getting somewhere. It'll all be in the tuning, but while Wikipedia offers one, it appears as if the six strings are to be read as three double courses. But compared to this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8G1ZVLP_tc

- it appears that the lowest two, the drones, are the only real double course, and the four fingered strings, presumably tuned as if double courses, are placed so as to be played individually. If that's right, this is a tuning I've never seen before and I would love to know the reasoning behind it. I'm sure there is one; my first guess is that the redundant string acts as a sympathetic string, adding to the resonance. So in practical terms, you confine yourself to fingering only two strings, and you have the option of changing which ones. But both sister strings could also possibly be played in tight harmony.

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Never mind. I misread the Wiki bit; it is indeed a double and four single courses in two unisons, as I worked out, but with a difference:

The crwth consists of a fairly simple box construction with a flat, fretless fingerboard and six gut strings, purportedly tuned gg´c´c´´d´d´´.

Purportedly. The main thing is if you're not in a band you won't have to be exactly at pitch so long as it's in tune with itself. What I really missed is that the fingered string "courses" are an octave apart, so that's a much-increased range right there. This is wild. I don't think you're going to find any other instrument even remotely like this.

Thinking about it, it seems to me that the fingered part of the crwth should fundamentally be approached as two divided monochords in principle, and with everything else you can wring out of that starting point.

I know nothing about the crwth, but it strikes me very much as not an instrument of fingerings in the violin sense, beyond what you get out of two "courses" in octaves, a third apart if I've got it right. I'd say it's first and foremost a melody instrument with extras, not unlike uilleann pipes with regulators. My guess is that you spend a lot of time in one "course" (can we have another name for what I'm trying to talk about, here?); the instrument clearly lends itself to simple tunes, and there's that drone to think of.