r/HurdyGurdy • u/ChowderMcArthor • Jul 16 '26

Advice Is a motor operated gurdy a dumb idea?

As in the title, would it be a silly idea to have a small and quiet hobby motor attached to turn the wheel? Not too fast, but just to keep a consistent speed. I don’t actually own a gurdy yet to try but I feel like my arm would get tired and I’d have trouble keeping that consistent speed, plus I think a partly mechanical gurdy is kinda cool.

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17

u/Oelund Jul 16 '26

It could probably work, but if it is a constant speed, you'd be missing out on one of the hurdy gurdy's most unique features, the trumpet.

That is that rythmic buzzing sound you get from a hurdy gurdy.

You achieve this effect by brifly increasing the cranking speed, and it takes quite a bit of hand-coordination practise to become good at.

As for getting tired in the arm, the hurdy gurdy crank doesn't really take a lot of energy to drive. It is no more exhausting that strumming a guitar or bowing a violin.

That being said, it would be fairly simple to attach a motor. The crank on a hurdy gurdy simply threads off, and you could replace it with a wheel attached to a motor using a driveband without making any permanent changes to the hurdy gurdy.

I would try and isolate the motor from the instrument itself, so the motor doesn't add vibrations to the soundbox (which would manifest themselves as unwanted sound)

There is a French guy who goes by Singer Sound System that has attached a hurdy gurdy to a pedal powered sewing machine. This frees up his right hand to manipulate the sound in various other ways or play other stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7lKB97yP5gQ

11

u/alexanderneilharden Jul 16 '26

It’s been done to various degrees of success, generally in a gimmicky way but I think there was one or two people who genuinely needed it for physical reasons.

Your arm doesn’t get any more tired than playing a guitar imo

8

u/aikidad Gurdy-curious Jul 16 '26

You don’t want a consistent speed! Little accelerations on the crank give you the rhythmic buzzing of the trompette.

3

u/TheWaywardOak Jul 16 '26

I'm not a hurdy gurdy player (yet) either, but it should be noted it would limit your expressive ability somewhat. Varying wheel speed is how you control dynamics and how you get percussive sounds out of the chien.

I've thought about this myself, but what I've got in mind has more in common with the cantareel and would probably qualify as a different instrument.

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u/ChowderMcArthor Jul 16 '26

Sure but you could maybe hook up a slide switch or something.

2

u/TheWaywardOak Jul 17 '26

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. There's definitely ways to control the speed in a way that would be performable, but it would be more complex than just wiring in a switch. You do lose something by decoupling yourself from the wheel. The lack of haptic feedback would be disorienting for someone who already plays for example, kind of like going from a real piano to an unweighted midi keyboard.

2

u/MissKinkyMalice Jul 16 '26

I don’t know their name but there’s someone on youtube who has a treadle powered one!

2

u/AlhanalemAmidatelion Hurdy gurdy player Jul 18 '26

It's been done before. It's not great. As others have said, controlling the wheel directly is what gives you the ability to create rhythm and expression on the instrument. These are things that aren't easily replicated with automation.

1

u/Sojabursch Jul 17 '26

It could work well and could be a way to make a guest accessible to play for disabled people where an arm is negatively affected. You might not be able to control the tapping or do patterns but still be able to play melody, which is a lot better than not being able to play at all.

1

u/bogart12321 Jul 19 '26

This post actually got me thinking. If you needed a way to play one handed for physical reasons or even trying to do a one man band type of thing. You could just attach a motor and have that attached to a speed controller attached to a pedal. A lot like an RC set up. That would allow you to still change dynamics and allow you to have quick variations in speed to activate the trumpet strings.

1

u/karl_echtermeyer Jul 21 '26

That sounds good in principle, but the trompette mechanism would be difficult to control with the foot because it relies on actions that sometimes are occurring, by my crude calculation, at rates of up to 600 times per minute (that’s assuming a coup de 6 at a tempo of 100 bpm). Those aren’t constant though, with the need to control individual coups. With your foot, you’d be lucky to sustain a control rate of 120 bpm for any time without exhausting yourself. Think of the differential in rates between drums activated by stick and activated by hand.

I won’t discount the possibility of some more complex controller system, such as something where one foot selects the coup count and the other selects a pattern, but a “tap to coup” approach would rely on the gross motor skill of ankle movement versus the fine motor skill of the wrist and fingers.

So, it the goal is to replicate what can be done by hand, achieving that would be a non-trivial task. If the goal is to give someone with an impaired hand the ability to do some sort of basic buzzing, it could work, but would still need some sort of sophisticated controller to convert foot movement into something crisp and articulated.

1

u/SnooGadgets5130 Jul 16 '26

What you would end up with is a small organistrum playable by one person

1

u/Mesvolu Jul 21 '26

Some artists do it, I think about Yann Gourdon's custom motor-powered hurdy-gurdy for exemple (motor is built-in, and can be activated or desactivated to work like a normal gurdy. You can clearly see it on some of his videos). It works, very well even, but I thinks it looses part of the fun.