Building a Santur — The Persian Hammered Dulcimer

The santur is Persia's hammered dulcimer: dozens of strings across a trapezoidal box, struck with two tiny wooden hammers. Struck strings shimmer — and this is the instrument the piano grew from.

Build a shallow trapezoidal wooden box — wider at the front than the back — with a thin, light soundboard on top. This box is the resonator.

Fit a row of fixed hitch pins down one slanted side and a row of tuning pins down the other. The courses of strings will stretch between them.

Stretch the strings across in groups (courses) of three or four tuned together — thin steel for the high courses, thicker bronze for the low ones. A full santur has around seventy strings.

Carve two rows of small wooden bridges (kharak) and stand them under the strings. Each bridge lifts a course and splits some strings so one string gives two notes, one on each side.

Tune each course with its pin. The two rows of bridges and the pins together let you set the Persian scale, including its quarter-tones.

Carve two very light, springy wooden hammers (mezrab), thin enough to bend, that you hold loosely between your fingers.

Tap a course with the tip of a hammer and let it bounce straight off. The strings ring out bright and shimmering — struck, not plucked.

Strike a string on both sides of its bridge to get two different notes from one string, and roll the two hammers fast for the santur's rippling tremolo.

The santur is a hammered dulcimer: instead of plucking or bowing, you set each string ringing with a sharp, glancing blow from a tiny wooden hammer that bounces straight off, leaving the string free to sing. A struck string is still just a string — its pitch rises with tension and falls with length and mass, exactly as on a lyre or guitar — but the hammer starts it with a bright, percussive attack and a long shimmering decay, which is the whole character of the dulcimer family's sound. The santur's strings run in courses, several tuned together for fullness, over two rows of little bridges; each bridge not only lifts the strings but divides some of them, so one string sounds one note to the left of its bridge and a different note to the right, packing many pitches into a small box, tuned with pins to the microtonal scales of Persian music. The trapezoidal soundboard amplifies it all, as a soundboard does in any string instrument. The hammered dulcimer is ancient and spread far and wide — the Persian santur, the Iraqi and Indian santoor, the Chinese yangqin, the Hungarian cimbalom and the European and Appalachian hammered dulcimers are all the same idea. And it has one very famous descendant: put the little hammers on the ends of levers and let a keyboard throw them at the strings, and the hammered dulcimer becomes the PIANO. On Youblob its box-zither cousin is the langspil, whose strings can also be sounded by hammering.