In various places of modern culture, the enigmatic, crank-powered hurdy gurdy can be found, creating strange, droning music. But where did it come from? Twitter: / fredintheknud Patreon: / fredrikknudsen Music: / @probecomposer
@@sarahgray430 even Harsh Noise? Why single out Black Metal? Are you so well schooled in Black Metal that you can make that statement? that Black Metal is so fundamentally different from, lets say, Death Metal, that it alone is not divine?
Exactly there used to be a whole family of double reed instruments, there are only two surviving members the oboe and the bassoon. We don’t even have the originals only drawings 😢
Costs thousands of dollars, requires near constant maintenance, and the people who own one never waste an opportunity to say so? Yeah, that checks out. XD
@@OtakuUnitedStudio Bruh, only people who want to wave their financial dicks around spend thousands. That, or they have a job like 3D rendering that actually requires it. But you can get a solid one, that beats current gen consoles while being more flexible, for not much more than a new console. All while being able to do more stuff with it. As for maintenance, not really. Aside from cleaning out dust occasionally, which you need to do with virtually any computer (including gaming consoles) you've just got to replace the thermal past every 2-4 years. Which is also something that should be done on modern consoles or pre-built PC's as well. If you've ever wondered why your console started sounded like a jet plan during play after a year or two, it probably needs a good dust cleaning and fresh thermal paste. Especially since console manufacturers tend to use the cheap shit, and have poor airflow for cooling.
23:19 "Noblewomen born after 1730 don't know how to run a territory, all they know is speak Italian, play the viol, laugh, sing, never be on time, go to bed at 4 AM, drink champagne and lie"
I fell asleep with youtube on autoplay. I had a dream that I was trying to steal a weird mechanical instrument from a museum, escape through the photo a newspaper, then sell said instrument to this video's narrator. I woke up at the very end of the video and had to watch the whole thing. So crazy...
i love it when things from the outside break into your dreams lol. this one time i had a dream i was in school, and the bell went off, and it turned out it was just my alarm clock
I apologize for how long this video took to produce; my life was undergoing significant changes. Things have resolved and I'm able to return fully to video production.
i'm 14 minutes into the video and can't help but infodump: "leier" is still sometimes used in german vocabulary as a verb, when someone says something unimportant in a droning and never ending tone, they are "leiern" (example: "er leiert schon wieder rum" ~ "he's going on again about nothing") it's not used as often anymore and i hear/read it less and less, but i do remember it from the early 2000's and not from any older books, but that may be, because it's kind of a rude thing to say and the older books i read didn't really have content rude enough to justify a "leiern"
Yeah I love Fred's videos but I've been avoiding them like the plague as of late because they make me feel... not good. A video on an obscure instrument is a pleasent surprise
@@dedicatedtransportation4130 Right? The TempleOS video legitimately had me fucked up for weeks. To see such a severe mental disorder so... intimately, it stays with you.
Or at least there was much more of its music used; the video about a musical instrument is entirely devoid of any actual music by the instrument. It only has a few example notes at the beginning, and the rest of the video is all but devoid music.
In general Spanish, the instrument is known as “zanfona”. But in parts of Spain, it’s called “gaita del pobre” or poor man’s bagpipe. There is a related instrument in Sweden called “nyckelharpa”.
Yes, there are several variants. In contemporary folk music the Nyckelharpa is not entirely uncommon in Sweden, together with the violin and the dragspel/the accordion.
French aristocratic pastoral ideals be like: Charles, observe. Look at my little shoes, theyre appropriately shabby so I may prance about the muddy fields in all of its splendor. 👁👄👁 Actual pastoral people: so our son starved to death yesterday.
@@yonatanbeer3475 Lol, farming and living in a natural environment doesn't inherently mean suffering any more than simply living does. I guess in the modern world not living in a city = "suffering" but this is a pretty distorted and arrogant understanding of the human experience.
@@sirknight4981 back then it often did mean suffering. Lords owned the farmlands of an area, farmers often didnt even own any part of the land they worked on. The food they produced was taken to be sold - so they only got a small cut of it themselves, so their lords could make the most money. They were stuck at one of the very lowest classes. To keep food for themselves was considered theft from their lords. The idea of having a highly structured method of farming and food production, in theory, means more food and leisure for all. However, while more food was indeed produced, it (along with its wealth) wasnt spread around evenly. The farming peasants suffered. There was no "easy, fulfilling life on the fields" which can exist now.
@@sirknight4981 yes sir! those city dwellers are gross to usins here. we like sleeping to the cadence of cicadas and crickets. we si......gulp moonshine and catch catfishkes with our hands! the whole time there's atleast one 12 yr old beatin the livin hell out of a fiddle !try that concrete pounder!your next door neighbor would call the sherrif. my neighbors are 6 miles away ! HA!
so my takeaway is that the french 1700s aristocracy kind of considered hurdy gurdy players to be like that one guy who always brings an acoustic guitar to parties and offers to play wonderwall
Frankly, the hurdy gurdy sounds like so many different instruments that most people probably don't even realize how often it's used in games, movies, and other media. This video was very informative. Thank you.
@Mephilis 78 Close. The horse's name was Phar Fignewton, a parody of the nonsense word fahrvergnügen used in a Volkswagen advertising campaign as well as doubling as a reference to the legendary racehorse Phar Lap.
Just a small correction. Germany: Drehleier A Leier alone is a hand held harp-like instrument. Think of Troubadix (Cacofonix/Assurancetourix) from the Asterix & Obelix comic.
@Nero von Aarfeste Have you seen the post on "what if the guy who named the walkie talkie named other objects"? Defibrilator? Heartie Startie! Fork? Stabbie Grabbie! etc
When you started playing I went "OOOOOOOOHH" in a super impressed manner, scaring my cat who was resting on my tummy. Seriously epic. So cool. Incredibly impressed.
I can't tell you how much I appreciated this video! I love that he included the art history as well as the audio history and the literature to corroborate and explain this instrument!
Once again (ad nauseum) a useless degree to actually helping someone produce useful work. At the end of the day, showing what you had produced to aid humanity versus little more than warm air. My sister "worked" for the U.S. Health Dept. for 35 yrs. She shuffled papers: if they had a paperclip she removed it, if it didn't she added one. If the papers were stapled she removed the staple, if not she stapled them. Every five or so packets she'd remove one of the center pages and add it to the next packet. Every coverpage had initial boxes and she'd add her initials before passing the forms on. She laughingly said the system's efficiency surely would go up when she took her vacation time or used her sick days (and probably once she retired). Yes, she received pay grade promotions and steady pay raises along with seniority step raises throughout her career. Always made sure to log in to work on time, spend some time each morning getting her morning coffee, stopping for morning break, taking lunch each day, stopping for afternoon break, attending every dept. meeting, and logging out at the end of the day exactly on time down to the minute. She enjoyed playing the game ...
@@fjb4932 yo Nietzsche it’s a fucking hurdy gurdy. And is this a copypasta?? This feels like an r/thathappened to me. If this ends up on Reddit I want this to be circled in red, lol Seriously tho it’s literally impossible to learn every little thing about a topic in 4 years. I never said my degree was useless. I use my skills every day AND I get paid for it. Learning didn’t stop once I got handed my diploma. Chill out, my guy. Jiminy Christmas.
My grandpa used to always talk about the instrument, but never giving context. He wouldn’t say that he played it, or heard it. He would just slide the instrument name into a conversation. I never knew that it was a real instrument, and it was so familiar to me.
You nailed it, I fell in love with the gurdy when I found Eluveitie back in ~2010. I've wanted to play one ever since but lately the pull has been particularly strong. Hoping to save up for a nice beginner piece in the future!
That was wonderful. I've been trying to explain the hurdy-gurdy to people and it's proved impossible for me. From now on, I'll just send them this video. I learned so much. I especially appreciated the focus on the DRONE as the essential aspect of its history and nature. That really pulled it together for me. Thank you, Fredrik Knudsen!
@@wegner7036 Uhm, the brazen bull was not an instrument, it was a brass sculpture with a horn that "transformed" the screams. Though you should take the bull with a grain of salt, there has never been proof of one actually existing. It's more likely it was just propaganda agaist the tyrant Phalaris.
Nice-- you've put together a lot of helpful information. One quibble: the word vielle actually has two syllables with the accent on the second syllable. This is important because it gives us the very punny French folk band named Ad Vielle Que Pourra, which is a pun on "advient que pourra," which is French for "come what may."
My uncle plays the bag pipes. He lives up a valley near our family farm. Every once in a while in the evenings he will play and it sounds haunting. This instrument reminds me very much of that sound echoing through the hills of western wisconsin.
Our there... In shops and collections filled to the brim with chordophones... Hurdy-gurdies and nyckelharpas work in a conspiracy to... _experiement_ On innocent fiddles and violins alike for their own, corrupted vices... Awaken, sheeple...
This is the best side of RU-vid, passionate people talking about what stirs them. I absolutely loved this! Ever since accidentally coming across a performance by Matt Loibner (forgive me if I misspelled his name) I’ve been fascinated by this instrument and as I was already familiar with your work I was delighted to find this. Bravo!!
There's a guy on RU-vid who makes videos about the history and inner workings of various electronics, both modern and obsolete, and they're absolutely fascinating. He's even made a couple of videos about toasters that were great. Some people just have a unique talent for making almost any subject interesting.
I used to play the bagpipes and shawns in a medieval band for a long part of my life. I am utterly delighted to learn you, who does amazing videos, plays a likeminded instrument.
"It can't get much worse than this" said the instrument strongly associated with the disabled and French nobility. "Are you sure about that?" Replied the Guillotine
To be fair, guitars technically can, too. Maybe he got his for less. I might be more concerned about the upkeep because I barely know how to change my guitar strings.
RU-vid cares = oxymoron of the day..... Also didn't "RU-vid cares" used to be a joke...or a meme? Or am I getting it mixed up with a Craig Ferguson joke?
@@OtakuUnitedStudio I mean, I guess most people wouldn't know its history, but that's not the same as having a history shrouded in mystery. I guess I'm just one of the oddballs that knows because being a D&D nerd also inclines you to be a history nerd.
I came for the hurdy gurdy and I stayed for the beautiful oration. I don't think I've ever thought so keenly about the sheer art and engineering behind both writing and narrating a documentary script. This isn't just listenable, it's intuitive and digestible - sectioned, marked, and punctuated clearly by tone and cadence. For some context there, I have both ADHD and dyslexia so retaining and organizing information can be precarious. There's a palpable difference here that's reducing the "gear slippage" I usually experience. Yeah... I think I'll be subscribing.
I have to say..its refreshing to come across such a niche video with unbiased facts and history with no ads..wish more content creators would follow in your steps. I applaud you good sir👏👏🙌
On the simpler side of instruments, you have the Berimbau. It's surprisingly good for rhythm for something that is basically a single string stuck onto a stick with a sand filled gourd.
@@pczb2692 ill add it to my list of instruments i might eventually buy on amazon. But first my guitar amp needs to replaced because my friend didn't understand how input and output jacks work...
This video sparked my interest in these instruments when it came out and I finally bought one at the end of last year, it's being hand made and should be here by march and I came back here to get a refresher, thanks again!
Fredrik Knudsen Your content is the best anyway, but thank you for revitalizing this under appreciated instrument. I first saw a gurdy when a guy was busking downtown in Portland Or. and fell in love. Thank you both for keeping this amazing sound alive and in public consciousness.
I don’t know if he still does it, but there was this guy on Something Awful who held a yearly summer thread where he encouraged people to learn how to play “weird” instruments. Ocarina, theremin, stuff like that. He also focused on relatively cheap instruments so anyone could participate, though, so hurdy-gurdies were probably out of the question. Actually, I wonder where you get a good ocarina these days. I had one with Kokopelli carved into it from that one site that always advertised in Nintendo Power when I was like eleven.
I know the hurdy gurdy. But I also seem like a girl who plays a weird board game that no one heard of. All by her own. Do you know smellory? Anyone? My favorite. It's basicly trivial pursuit but with scents.
My father comes from central France (Berry), he knows bits of songs in traditional berrichon patois that allude to or are meant to be played with a "vielle à roue". Great video, thanks !
That's really interesting! I love French Vielles. Much prettier and nicer sound than other types of Gurdy! The greatest Gurdies in the world come from Jenzat.
I have been watching your videos a long time. This is one of the best I've seen. Not only do you give the full history of the instrument. You also play it. I enjoyed this video. Very informative. I had heard of the instrument, but never knew it's history. Much less see anyone play one. This was different than your other videos. In a good way. I learned a lot about the instrument. Very cool.
Patty Gurdy is how I came to know of this instrument. I had heard it in other things, such as the Witcher soundtracks, but didn't realize what the instrument was until stumbling across Patty. Thank you for this video on the instrument! I have fallen in love with it and am happy to have learned more about its history.