Building a Nyckelharpa — The Swedish Keyed Fiddle

The nyckelharpa is a bowed Swedish fiddle, but instead of pressing the strings with your fingers you press wooden KEYS. Each key drives a little tangent against the string to make a note.

Build a long, hollow wooden body with a light soundboard on top. This box amplifies the bowed strings.

Stretch a melody string and one or two drone strings along the top, over a bridge, tuned with pegs.

Under the melody string, run a set of thin strings you never touch — the SYMPATHETIC strings. Tuned to the scale, they ring on their own whenever their note is played, giving the halo of sound.

Build a box under the neck holding a row of sliding wooden keys, each carrying a small hardwood tangent.

Position each key's tangent so that pressing the key from below stops the melody string at the next note of the scale — a keyboard of frets you push up into the string.

String a short springy stick with horsehair to make a bow, and rub it with pine rosin.

Hold the harpa across your body on a strap, bow the strings with one hand, and press the keys with the other. The keys pick out the tune while the drones and sympathetic strings shimmer beneath.

The nyckelharpa joins two ideas. First it is a bowed instrument: drawing a rosined bow across a string sets it into steady stick-slip vibration, the same Helmholtz motion as the erhu or violin, so the note sings on as long as you bow. Second, it is stopped by a KEYBOARD rather than by fingers: each key carries a tangent, a little hard ridge that pushes against the string to shorten its speaking length to a fixed note, exactly as a fret does — the same mechanism that fingers the melody on a hurdy-gurdy, but here you bow by hand instead of turning a wheel. What gives the nyckelharpa its glittering, cathedral-like tone is a third set of strings, the SYMPATHETIC strings, stretched under the melody string and never touched: each is tuned to a note of the scale, and whenever that note sounds on the bowed string, the matching sympathetic string is shaken into vibration by resonance and rings along on its own, wrapping every note in a soft halo — the same resonance trick used by the Indian sitar and sarangi. Played in Sweden since the Middle Ages and pictured on medieval church walls, the nyckelharpa is a cousin of the hurdy-gurdy (its keyed neighbour) and of the whole bowed-string family.