Lovely sound and very practical look! I like that you use the eyelets for the strings instead of the ancient way. Going to try and make one...wish me luck!
I used a keyhole saw to get through a lot of the wood on my lyre. It saves a lot of wood, so that you still have some nice leftover wood. And, you're left with clean lines that don't require so much chiseling. I then finished the cuts with a japanese saw when they were long enough. You'll also want to be very careful about the shape of the grooves for the strings, I've noticed. Any imperfection and you'll get unnecessary slapping, which results in twang. I think this is what you're hearing on those top two strings. I had to do a lot of tweaking to get the grooves right. Nice work, regardless. Sounds good.
Yeah, I regretted my hole cutting method throughout the entire process... I'd do everything very differently next time. I definitely have some bridge experimenting to do, although any buzzing on this has always stemmed from the tuner end. Thanks for watching !
Definitely worth the time spent making it. It sounds really good. I will have a go myself once I have worked out the measurements. Did you use guitar spruce for the front sound board?
That's lovely. I saw someone playing one on an old Time Team episode once, and they were getting octave and fifth harmonics out of it as well. If it has 7 strings, that's a LOT of notes you can get out of something fairly small and portable.
These were from an assortment I found on amazon. If you look up "through hole rivets" or "eyelets" you should find some options. For strings like this, you can use ones that are pretty small.
Wait, you skipped the previous step to threading the strings through the bottom holes. How the hell did you get them inside and through them in the first place?
These are nylon classical guitar strings. You can buy just the treble strings - not the metal wound ones. Specific strings will depend on instrument size and tuning, but I believe for this lyre, tuned to FGABCDE, I used (low to high) 2 G strings, 3 B strings, and 2 E strings.
They are standard nylon guitar strings, from low to high GGBBBEE, tuned to FGABCDE. That combo of string gauges seems to work well for that tuning and ones close to it. Scale length is approximately 21.5 in/54.5cm.
Someday I'd like to, but for now I'm still making everything in my apartment so I don't have much capacity for making projects like this on a regular basis. This is currently the only lyre I have made!
