In a moment of inspiration/madness/gung-ho recklessness, I have dismantled the better of my two guitar-zithers and rearranged all the strings, stabbing myself several times with small pointy bits of metal in the process.

I’d been wondering about doing this for a while, as although the instrument makes a lovely sound, I don’t find the standard layout of the strings at all conducive to playing anything sensible, and the instrument has lain largely unused since I bought it for next to nothing on eBay.

There are two problems with the standard layout, as I see it, and both are to do with spacing of strings.

The right hand strings, if one follows the notation often emblazoned on the instrument beneath the strings, is almost chromatic, but not quite. You’ve got F#, G# and C#, but no A# or D#, so if you run up the octave C->C you get

C-C#-D-E-F-F#-G-G#-A-B-C

Now, given that I play the Jeffries Duet concertina, which is – at least superficially – one of the least logical instruments going, any problems caused by this inconsistency of spacing in the zither’s scale ought to be trivial. However, getting my fingers to remember what on earth is going on without peering down at it all the time has proved almost impossible without putting in an amount of work that I’m not inclined to do.

So, it’s now tuned to a scale of D major over a compass of a tenth, with a couple of odd notes at the top. Each string is now doubled, so each step of the scale is an equal distance from the last. The layout is thus now:

DD-EE-F#F#-GG-AA-BB-C#C#-DD-EE-F#F#-A-D

“That’s no good,” you might think, “a tenth isn’t a broad enough compass for playing tunes.”

Well, no. Probably not. But as my aim was to provide myself with a completely diatonic zither for song accompaniment, it will most likely be used for textural effects and small repetitive rhythmic figures. And for that kind of thing it’ll do just fine.

The alterations to the left hand strings have been even more drastic. The different chords are normally so close together that it’s almost impossible to strike a chord cleanly and strongly without picking up at least one foreign note from the adjacent chord.

So, on my new and improved guitar-zither, gone are the standard five chords of F, C, G, D, and A7, to be replaced with just three: D with no 3rd, G with no 3rd and an added 9th, and A7sus, with better spacing so that the left hand bit can be played as a rhythm instrument rather than plucked haphazardly.

In theory it’s now a much more useful instrument for my purposes. It remains to be seen, of course, how well the strings hold their tuning at pitches they weren’t really designed for…