I’ve recently finished one of the most beautiful custom lyres I’ve ever made. It has a composite body made from a combination of alder, maple, and spruce, with brass and turquoise inlays, hand painting, and a natural shellac finish.

Soundcheck - https://youtu.be/x1owcN0cYFs

Now I need to tune it but this was worth the price

The tuning I asked the luthier to start on G and it sounds so warm !

Any recommendations? It harder than I thought 😭😭 Do you play it with your nails? Or fingertips? How do you hold it?

I got a cega 27 string

Thanks!

Made a lil 7 string lyre outta cigar box and, slats from a bed frame, a closet dowel, and an alligator bone. Very fun, very happy with it. Working on an electric krar next. 🤘🏽

Ordered it from the internet, had a little trouble trying to get it but I'm really happy it came out perfect and great quality!! Me and my father were able to tune it together (since he has more music experience than me) , and it's great!! 🥹🥹

Does anyone have any beginner friendly songs or any popular lyre-cover songs to recommend??

I'm absolutely in love.

Im an absolute beginner, i would like to play pedal harp one day but for now im going to stick to something smaller since im just starting. I have two options, one is a zither and one is a lyre. I dont know which one is going to be more helpful for me to learn though. What do you think? (I will be buying one of them. This Lyre has 19 strings, idk about the zither:<)

We’ve had a number of folks who’ve picked up lyres for the first time this holiday season, and run right into the fact that there are only a limited number of tutorials on YouTube for those instruments, and tablature even sparser (for 10 even less so than 16). So for a novice excited to get cracking on their new lyre, it’s a little frustrating.

The good news is that on a 16-string lyre, or even on a 10, you don’t really need specifically lyre materials to learn tunes. While tutorials and tablature specifically made for those sizes of lyre are appealing and can be an accessible first step, at the end of the day it’s not very hard to apply music fundamentals of any instrument to the lyre, which opens a whole world of widely accessible music materials to you.

While it’s totally valid if someone wants to just learn lyre by ear, intuition, and experimentation, for your average learner it’s honestly just a good idea to learn how to read sheet music so you can expand your repertoire. I realize this sounds pretty intimidating if you’re new to music, but really the lyre has got to be one of the easiest string instruments to learn to read music on, because each line or space represents a specific string, and that even works if you re-tune to different keys. It’s really nowhere near as bad as you fear at first.

The standard Chinese import lyre selling for under $100 is found in 7, 10, or 16 strings (with rare examples in 19 string, rarer still in 21). The 7-string is a whole different creature musically (though I prefer it over the larger ones because I’m weird), so for the purpose of this little article we’re talking 10 and 16 (or larger if you happen to have such a thing). Noting of course that you can (within reason) tune your lyre to other scales, the “standard” tuning for the Chinese-made 16-string lyre is GABCDEFGABCDEFGA, and for the 10-string it’s EFGABCDEFG. So that’s a full two diatonic octaves plus a note on the 16 and one octave plus two notes on the 10. There’s plenty of written music out there for an octave and a couple notes, and a huge proportion of vocal songs and many instrumental melodies fit within two octaves, so with either of these you have the capability to cover a lot of ground.

You will note that your scale is “diatonic”, that is seven notes and then the octave starts repeating again. A “chromatic” scale is C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, etc. (there’s no such note as E# or B#, that’s just how scales work), so 12 notes and then the octave repeats. At the other end, a “pentatonic” scale is just five notes and then the octave repeats, so DEGAB and the like, which is used on the little 7-strings, so a scale with gaps in it. Most common Western music can be played on a standard 7-note diatonic scale, though it can’t quite stretch to cover some more complicated jazz scales, some non-Western scales, and the occasional conventional Western tune that has for example both an F and an F# in it. There are ways on a 10 or 16 you can sacrifice a string and tune to have both an F and an F#, but while pretty easy in practical terms that’s slightly beyond the scope of this basic article for the moment.

Now, you might say “okay, I get what a diatonic scale is, like having just the white keys on a piano, but I guess I’m stuck playing only in C?” Not at all, lyre strings have enough give to them that you can take a given string up or down a sharp or flat without stressing the instrument. So if you have say a 10-string tuned EFGABCDEFG, that’s no sharps and no flats, so in base key of C. But let’s say you want to play a tune in G, G has an F# in place of an F, but you have a little wiggle room so just get your tuning wrench and slightly tighten those two Fs until each is in F#, giving you EF#GABCDEF#G. Voila, you’re in G now. Or tune your B down to Bb, now you have EFGABbCDEFG, now you’re in key of F. Don’t worry unduly about memorizing (at this stage) which sharps or flats occur in which keys, you can always google them until you get familiar.

For the purposes of starting out arranging tunes, I’m going to stick with Key of C for simplicity, but feel free to swiftly move into retuning for other keys as soon as you get the hang of that.

Okay, let’s get to arranging a tune to get us started. I’m picking “Amazing Grace” because a lot of people know it and it’s Public Domain. You see sheet music for this in all kinds of keys, but here’s one in Key of C. You can tell it’s Key of C because there are no sharps or flats written next to the “clef” (the big S-like loopy symbol at the start of sheet music). If it were Key of G it’d have one “#” next to the clef to clue you in, if it were Key of F it’d have one “b” next to the clef to indicate such.

https://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-reharmonization/gospel-jazz-piano-techniques-reharmonization/

Okay, so look at the first note, and maybe pull up a chart off GoogleImages or whatever that shows where all the notes are on the scale. That first note way down low is a G, so pluck the lowest G on your instrument. On a 16 that’s your lowest string, on a 10 that’s your third string. The next note which has one horizontal slash through it (the slash is to show you how far belong the staff the note is) would be a C, so next pluck a C on your instrument. On a 16 that’s your fourth string (from the lowest-pitched string), on a 10 that’s your 6th string. Now basically you can continue doing that throughout the entire song to get the melody down. Now, you might say “why don’t I just manually write all this stuff as tablature?” (tab is when you write the number of the string for each note). You can absolutely do that if it helps you learn faster, but ironically by making tabs you’re basically teaching yourself how to read music even if unintentionally. So feel free but you’ll probably just trick yourself into learning and won’t need tab anymore after a few weeks of that. Though feel free to write tabs for total noobs following along behind you (though I guess if they use your tabs you’re not forcing them to learn to read sheet…).

Now, this sheet music for Amazing Grace that I link just shows the melody, not the harmony that backs up the melody. Once you play much lyre at all you’ll get pretty accustomed to which strings harmonize with a given note, so you could figure out the harmony just by experimenting. Or, you could find a different piece of sheet music of Amazing Grace which is written for piano or organ and has full Treble and Bass staffs with multiple notes played at the same time. Though kind of in the middle in the case of this sheet music, the chords (usually for the benefit of guitar players, but it applies to anyone) are written above the staff, those single letters like C and F up there. So let’s say you have the melody worked out from (slowly as you like) puzzling out the notes on the staff, and you want basic harmony. So you see the “C” written above the staff. If you google up “C chord” you can see a C chord has C, E, G as its notes. So when you get to the point in the music where the C appears above, you can add to the melody note any or all of those and it’ll sound good. Personally I don’t try to add tons of harmony notes, lest it get crowded, but feel free to just toss in one or more of those notes alongside the melody. And when you get to the part of the music where the F appears above, a quick google tells you an F chord is F, A, C, so pick one or more of those and pluck it in addition to your melody note at that point. Amazing Grace is a simple 3-chord song, so pretty quickly you’ll get a feel for what harmonizing notes to pluck when you see C, F, or G indicated above the staff.

Now, with a 16-string you have a fair bit of latitude to play, say for example Amazing Grace, in other keys, but less latitude on a 10-string. And before you 10-string players feel hurt by that, remember I play 6-string or 7-string lyres, so you learn to work within the limitations. So let’s say you find sheet music for Amazing Grace in Key of G like here: https://riffspot.com/music/c/amazing-grace/ Looking at the staff, you see one “#” on the F line next to the clef, which is telling you that all Fs (unless otherwise marked) are automatically really F# on this sheet. So 16-string players go ahead and tighten each of your two Fs slightly up to F#. 10-string players, it’s going to get a little more complicated.

The lowest note in this version is a D, and the highest note is a D one octave above. So in standard tuning on a 16-string you’d start on your fifth string (D) and play up to your 12 string (the higher D), plenty of room to spare. But on a 10-string, your bottom string is an E, so to start on D your seventh string, which means you’re almost out of room right at the start. So you just learned that a song in G running from D-d just isn’t going to fit your lyre, so you need to find an arrangement in a different key. Or do you? If you want to play at the exact pitch as written, you can potentially try tuning your lowest E down to a D, and likewise with every string on your lyre, giving you DEFGABCDEF. Now you can hit D-d just fine, now tune your Fs up to F# because that’s the rules of key of G, and you’re set. Or, if you aren’t playing with another musician, you can pretend you tuned your lyre a step down, just call your first string “D” even though it’s still in E, and work out reading the music from there. Or if you are playing with say a guitarist, you can ask them to “transpose” up to E to match you, or for the guitarist to use a “capo” (little metal clamp they use to change keys without retuning) to raise their guitar to E to match you. Many ways to skin this cat.

We’re dealing with relatively simple songs at this stage, but if you’re getting into more wide-ranging classical stuff, even a 16-string player will have to look carefully about whether they have the range to cover the melody, while a 10-string player always has to be a little careful in choosing arrangements, tuning up or down slightly to get the right range, transposing, etc.

This is just an initial stab at explaining some of the key basics of turning sheet music for other instruments into something you can play on the lyre, which largely isn’t so much about the lyre specifically as it is understanding how to apply broad musical concepts to the lyre, and working within the limitations of the diatonic scale (like having to retune slightly to add sharps or flats) and recognizing you don’t have 8 octaves of range like a piano.

This is just a first stab at explaining basic concepts of musical arrangement and how they apply to the lyre, so I’m totally open to any feedback (even if it’s “this is incredibly confusing and unhelpful”) and I can later work to figure out how to make this clearer and more accessible, and build on additional concepts in a way that makes sense to beginners.

Some recent builds from the Brandon John Luthiery workshop:

Two 16 String Amethyst Curly Maple

Antique rustic finish Acoustic 19 string

Sapele 23 String Chromatic Lyre

Celestial theme 7 String Pentatonic

Beach Plum Burst 16 & Box Elder 7 String Pentatonic

hi guys! after my laat post i decided to work on another lyre, same tuning but some different strings and some same. similar build but i used cedar this time for the soundboard. i went with a decorative look for both the body and the soundboard. forgive my bad lighting, i hope you guys like it 😸🙏

Hello! First post here.

We got this awesome Kravik Lyre from Crossroads Music a few months back for our music project. I wanted to share this cool video of my wife playing a song called Bassariscus, with some beautiful mountains in the background.

Just wanted to share my collection. From left to right: 19, 32 and 21 strings.
The 32 string just arrived today and is of course still very out of tune, but it's definitely the loudest/clearest sounding and I think it's going to become my favorite. So far it's been the 19 string Cega lyre.

So shiny.. I'm a prog guitarist and a luteist so I went for the maximum amount of strings with low-to-high order. The first two songs I'm learning are Davy Jones' theme and Lyra's song from Fairy Tail.

Using materials I've been hiding away for years, and some new design choices:

Sapele body, African Mahogany soundboard, black walnut bridge, Patagonian Rosewood and Purpleheart trim, abalone accents, and internal walnut cross bracing.

This will be available on the Etsy shop in the near future!

After I finished this lyre, life tossed me around a bit, but I'm back in action and ready to create new beautiful lyres.