You can also select between unison and octave Main strings. You can choose how many Drone and how many Main strings you want playing – for a simple, stripped-back sound or a fuller, richer timbre. Firstly, it puts several important aspects of the instrument’s setup under your control.
Hurdy Gurdy does two things to give you a great degree of authenticity. Our Kontakt hurdy-gurdy includes drone strings and melody strings with separate control. On the Effects pane there’s a very nice Reverb to give your sound a bit of breathing space, plus Chorus, Echo, Rotary Speaker and Amp Cab simulations in case you want to put your hurdy-gurdy through the equivalent of a guitarist’s pedalboard. A real-life hurdy-gurdy is a monophonic instrument – one note at a time, apart from the drones – but with ours you can choose to follow tradition or break with it and play chords if you like.
The drones can also sometimes be tuned (for example, to a perfect fifth) to add an open chordal accompaniment to the melody. It works by rubbing a rosined wooden wheel against violin-style strings, which include both fixed-pitch drones and playable melody strings, which are often tuned an octave apart. It’s complex and organic and wonderfully evocative. It can sound brisk and cheerful or hauntingly plaintive it can be driven hard to get a really raw attack to the notes, or eased back for a smoother and subtler effect. The hurdy-gurdy is a marvellous thing: a thrumming, resonating, buzzing box of sound, driven by a hand-cranked wooden wheel and a fistful of keys.
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