Building a Charango — The Little High Lute of the Andes

The charango is a small fretted lute with ten strings in five doubled courses. When the Spanish brought the lute-and-guitar family to the Andes, local makers shrank it and famously backed it with an armadillo shell — small body, short strings, a bright high voice.

Hollow or build a small, deep rounded soundbox — traditionally an armadillo shell, today carved from a block of wood. Keep it small: a little box is what gives the charango its bright, high sound.

Glue a thin flat softwood soundboard over the open face and cut a round soundhole in it. This top is the speaker that radiates the strings' vibration.

Fix a straight neck to the body and lay in the frets — little ridges across the neck. Pressing a string against a fret shortens its speaking length and so raises its note; the fret positions are what set the scale.

Run ten strings in FIVE doubled courses (two strings side by side per course) from a bridge on the soundboard up over the frets to ten tuning pegs. The doubled strings ring together for the charango's shimmering chorus.

Tune the five courses (the classic charango tuning is re-entrant, so it is not simply low-to-high), then strum and pluck. Press behind a fret to change a note, and let the doubled strings shimmer.

The charango is a lute: strings stretched over a soundbox and along a fretted neck, plucked or strummed. Three ideas make it work. First, pitch: a string sounds higher when it is shorter, tighter or lighter, so the player raises a note by pressing the string down onto a FRET, which shortens the part that can vibrate — the same trick as the oud and the guitar, and the reason the frets are spaced the way they are. Second, doubled COURSES: the charango pairs its strings two-by-two, and because no two strings are ever perfectly identical they beat gently against each other, giving that rich shimmering chorus (the same reason a twelve-string guitar or a mandolin sounds so full). Third, and most charango of all, SIZE: the soundbox and the strings are tiny, and small light strings on a short scale vibrate fast, so the whole instrument sits an octave or so above a guitar — bright, chirping, cutting through the thin high-altitude air of the Andes. It descends from the Spanish vihuela and baroque guitar carried across the Atlantic, themselves descendants of the Arabic oud, and it belongs with every soundbox-and-strings instrument from the lyre of Ur onward — the charango is simply that ancient idea shrunk to fit a poncho pocket.