The hurdy-gurdy is one of Europe's oldest musical instruments. A kind of mechanical violin, it uses keys and a crank, along with melody and drone strings. Some call it the medieval synthesizer, and a ...

Members of Led Zeppelin helped create Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in the studio. The tune paved the way for a lot of the band’s later work. Donovan himself argued that Jimmy Page’s contributions to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In 1968, folk singer Donovan was in India, studying transcendental meditation with The Beatles, when he finished writing a ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The hurdy-gurdy is the duck-billed platypus of instruments. It has strings but you don’t pick or strum them. It ...

If Slipknot were to ever add a tenth member, we hope it's a hurdy-gurdy player. YouTuber Michalina Malisz has repurposed five of the band's riffs on the hand crank folk instrument and it actually ...

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory ...

It never hurts to iterate the phrase “Op-Ed” at the beginning of articles in this section. It may help us (in this case, I) remember that the writer is not an encyclopedia or – to be more current – ...

Stringed instruments bowed by a wheel cranked by hand have been around for centuries, and come in many shapes and sizes. Inspired by 16th century instruments, mechanical model maker UGears has created ...

If you’ve never heard a hurdy-gurdy before, you’re in for a treat. Not many people have, since they’re instruments which are uncommon outside of some eastern European communities. Think of a violin ...

The only difference was, bagpipes usually sound like a polyphonic assembly while this sound seems like a lone voice shrewdly culled from such an assembly, singled out, groomed up and presented to us ...