The hurdy-gurdy is one of Europe's oldest musical instruments. A kind of mechanical violin, it uses keys and a crank, along with melody and drone strings. Some call it the medieval synthesizer, and a ...

If Slipknot were to ever add a tenth member, we hope it's a hurdy-gurdy player. YouTuber Michalina Malisz has repurposed five of the band's riffs on the hand crank folk instrument and it actually ...

Members of Led Zeppelin helped create Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in the studio. The tune paved the way for a lot of the band’s later work. Donovan himself argued that Jimmy Page’s contributions to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In 1968, folk singer Donovan was in India, studying transcendental meditation with The Beatles, when he finished writing a ...

George Harrison wrote a verse for Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” Donovan revealed why George’s lyrics weren’t used in the final song. In addition, he said the tune might’ve been inspired by The Beatles’ ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The hurdy-gurdy is the duck-billed platypus of instruments. It has strings but you don’t pick or strum them. It ...

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory ...

If you’re looking for a long journey into the wonderful world of instrument hacking, [Arty Farty Guitars] is six parts into a seven part series on hacking an existing guitar into a ...

Stringed instruments bowed by a wheel cranked by hand have been around for centuries, and come in many shapes and sizes. Inspired by 16th century instruments, mechanical model maker UGears has created ...

It never hurts to iterate the phrase “Op-Ed” at the beginning of articles in this section. It may help us (in this case, I) remember that the writer is not an encyclopedia or – to be more current – ...

The only difference was, bagpipes usually sound like a polyphonic assembly while this sound seems like a lone voice shrewdly culled from such an assembly, singled out, groomed up and presented to us ...