I was watching Antiques Roadshow US on satellite a day or two ago, and they showed a ukelion. It was a many-stringed thing with a vaguely ukelele shape at one end and a very wide neck. There were 4 lots of 4 strings from end to end, and what appeared to be some more diagonally at the top, somehow, under the main ones. The whole was played with a short bow (same size as a nickelharpa's). The expert said that door to door salesmen used to go round promoting these in the 20s/30s as the ideal thing for getting the family together for musical evenings, etc. After much haggling they would eventually agree to instalments of perhaps $1 per week. By the time the frustrated punters decided the thing was unplayable and cancelled, they had usually made a tidy little sum on each one.

Andrea

If I could invent a new instrument it'd be have to be a self-bowing fiddle. I have had 2 lessons now, and the bowing's getting worse and worse the more I try! It could work off a neural implant so that it played the way you wanted, and could have an option to take over left-hand function too (the original way I phrased that last bit would have been open to misinterpretation!)