The item you saw is sometimes called a hurdy gurdy, however the true meaning of that term is the reiterating lute-type device from medieval times that Sting has been known to play in some of his recent hit songs. You have a barrel piano. We have restored several of these. I have one small one. They go from a couple of feet tall up to over 8 feet tall and wider than an upright piano. They often will have triangle, bass drum, snare drum, wood block, or cymbal playing along. Often a solo instrument of orchestra bells or a set of piano unisons with four or more strings for louder sound. Some have reiterating mechanisms to repeat solo notes really fast like a mandolin or balalaika. You will find them on Ebay. Faventia is one of the more prominent brands. They sell from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. The very large ones may sell for tens of thousands while some are over $100K. They were built in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, England and first showed up in the 1600's. For technicians who run into them. They are seldom chromatic. They will be designed for playing in usually only one key. That means there are certain notes missing. You will notice that the name of the note is metal-stamped into the wood pin block or printed in India Ink. In the bass end there are even more notes missing. This is so that the bass can play only the ooom-pah in the key around which the instrument is based. This worked well since there was no keyboard, and the barrels were not interchangeable. Very few have extra barrels. There are people who have written computer programs that can repin or pin newly made barrels from MIDI files. Barrels play from three to 12 tunes. The barrel shifts over for the next tune. Some of them must be changed by manually shifting the barrel but some are designed to spiral over from start to finish, thereby not repeating a song until all the others have been played. Some songs on this kind may be more than one rotation of the barrel while normally one song is one rotation of the barrel. There were automatic organs that worked just like these. Some are called musical clocks when they play a tune at different times of the day as they are triggered by the clock. Beethoven wrote Wellington's victory for a huge version of this (built by the Metronome inventor, Maelzel,) called the Pan Harmonicon which included gun fire from the percussions. Mozart and Haydn wrote music for musical clock. If you want to know more, google "MMD" (Mechanical Music Digest) and ask your questions. There are thousands of automatic music folk on there to answer your questions. Join to get a daily digest or use the archive to see if your questions have already been answered. D.L. Bullock www.thepianoworld.com -----Original Message----- From: J Patrick Draine [mailto:draine@comcast.net] Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 6:06 PM To: Pianotech Subject: "hurdy gurdy" I have a customer who has what he calls a hurdy gurdy. A quick Google search of that term reveals something completely different, so allow me to attempt a description, and hope for some enlightenment/direction from y'all. The thing has a strung back like a "birdcage" or "cottage piano", and has a large cylinder which, when cranked, drives leather covered hammers, producing a cacophonous din. It hadn't been tuned in many decades, but with the aid of a SAT II with the oscillator-to-speaker plugged in, I managed to chip it within 150 cents of 440. The customer of course is sure it's priceless, and is looking to sell it for big bucks! Anyone have a more precise name for this thing, or a website somewhere out there with further information? Patrick
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