I was putting in an order at StringsDirect.com, who, incidentally, are truly excellent and almost always have your strings with you the next day. I noticed their Legacy strings for £2.99 a set. For three pounds a go, I thought they had to be worth a punt, if only for the sake of curiosity.

And they’re amazingly good. Admittedly they do have a very “phosphor bronze” sound but they sound much better on the Taylor than Martins and various other strings have done. And they seem to be lasting longer with continual bashing from my metal fingerpicks than any other strings have done so far.

So an all-round thumbs-up for Legacy strings!

My Oscar Schmidt harp has a custom set of 18 chord bars made by Chris Younger; in a previous life it was set up as a diatonic, but Chris reverted it back to a chromatic for me.

I came at the organisation of the chord bars, I suppose, from a wish to make them as musically logical as possible, so I kept them strictly in the circle of fifths, and organised so that each trio of buttons gives a II-V-I chord sequence.

Then I went and spoiled it by disposing of the F# minor chord that would have made the instrument completely regular, and replacing it with an Eb chord. It makes no sense having it there, but there was nowhere else to put it!

Row 1: Bb F C G D A
Row 2: Gm Dm Am Em Bm Eb
Row 3: F7 C7 G7 D7 A7 E7

I’m finding this layout really playable.

Until now.

For years I’ve been a rhythm guitarist and flatpicker but in the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of fingerpicking on mountain dulcimer and, to an extent, on the autoharp, and it seemed to make sense to transfer this to guitar. So, armed with my trusty “claws” – steel Jim Dunlop fingerpicks – I set about the Taylor with gusto.

Within a couple of days of heavy fingerpicking abuse the guitar developed some horrible string buzz. I wondered if I’d got some unexpected bridge wear, so changed the strings just to be certain. Sure enough, everything was fine once the new strings were on. But only for a couple of days.

The string buzz came back. Then I noticed that the plastic coating of the Elixir strings was coming off in shavings because of the scraping action of the steel picks. This was what was creating the buzz.

Admittedly, I can be pretty heavy-handed but am surprised that I can wear Elixir strings out in a matter of days – especially when they’ll last me months when playing rhythm or flatpicking. Has anyone else had this happen?

I’ve switched back, for now, to Martin strings and everything is hunky-dory.

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…