Nope, Alice, it still doesn't play, and I'm too lazy to sign off Bill's desktop and onto mine. But I will go there later. All the same, when I first got my zither, a friend did say happily that it sounded like a big music box. I just thought it sounded like a heavenly choir.... In case I haven't made it obvious, I really like it.

Guess I should tell (again) the story of how I got this Beast. In 1990, shortly after my mom's death, her best friend called to tell me she had a funny musical instrument in her attic, origin and nature unknown, but "it says zither on the box," and said she had a feeling that I ought to have it. I said, "I might never get around to playing it, we have a house full of musical instruments that I don't play any more." She said, "Fine. Then it can sit at your house instead of in my attic." I said, "I don't know, it may be valuable." She said, "Fine. Then you can sell it if you want to. I just think you ought to have it." So she brought it over.

I opened the flat cardboard box and there was this beautiful guitar zither with a decal of a rose on the soundbox. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw that silly rose. It was totally out of tune, of course, but I ran a fingernail across the strings and it echoed and rang in the room and I fell even deeper in love with it.

I taught myself to play, bit by bit, no Internet in my life at the time so I was on my own; and as I have said above, I don't think I position it the way a traditional German zither player would. Playing it did not come easy. I practiced and practiced, but it was two years before I ever played it in public without a single mistake (still a rare occurrence).

harpgirl, is any of this helping?

Oh by the way. My zither has decals showing how to tune it, because it's a people's zither, intended to be tuned and played by relatively ignorant amateurs. Your concert zither doesn't have decals because it's intended to be played by trained professionals or at least music students. My zither came with a song sheet (in German) that you place under the strings and follow the dotted lines to pick out a few simple melodies!

I tune my chords (starting at the edge of the zither) as E, A, D, F, G, C. All the chords are set up with a heavy bass string on the RIGHT. The chords are not all in the same order. It's E-B-G#-g, E-A-C#-a, D-A-F#-d, F-A-C-f, D_B_G_g, E_C_G_c.

The melody strings are around 3/8 inch apart, nice and widely spaced, and chromatic, two octaves, C to C, so 27 notes. So a total of 51 strings I guess.

Someone (Dick Levine or Margaret MacArthur, probably, they both collect zithers) told me that most zithers are diatonic. Maybe that's why mine is labeled as a "Concert Guitar Zither": because it's chromatic. But as I said above, it is just a lowly guitar zither. But IMHO a pure dream of a lowly guitar zither.

I have a second zither, a concert zither I think, but it's stringless and forlorn as yet. In fact, harpgirl, this thread may be just the thing for me to figure out what to do with that thing, which was bought for me as a birthday present and which I fully intended to string and play ASAP but you know how it is with good intentions....

Catspaw, glad you're enjoying the thread. Me too! -- Most of those links were already in my bookmarks file but since, unlike my SO Bill Day, I don't have unlimited Mudcatting time (if only because I can never get near the computer), I had never fully explored them until harpgirl started this thread.

- Rita Ferrara