Lute Backed Hurdy Gurdy?

What, pray tell, Mr. Keilholtz, is a "lute-backed hurdy-gurdy?" Is that the thing that the man with the monkey plays?

No! No! No! That is a barrel organ. The only thing it has in common with a hurdy gurdy is a handle. It only plays what has been pre-programmed, as it were, into it by means of pegs or loops that trigger notes much as a music box does.

A hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument that plays by means of a wheel scraping the strings. A keyboard stops the main melody string to make various notes, and one or more other strings play drones. When the hurdy-gurdyist moves the wheel a little fast, a special string that buzzes makes a sound. Hurdy-gurdies can be either diatonic or chromatic, and they can take a variety of basic forms.

One of the common way to make a hurdy-gurdy is to take a guitar or lute and use it as the body. Here we have a guitar-backed hurdy-gurdy:

If the hurdy-gurdy maker had used a lute to start with, it would have been a lute backed hurdy-gurdy (a very hot recording, turn down the volume first, as this is a bright instrument as well). Be sure to watch to the end, as it is a very good performance, and you have to see the musicians grin at the end:

There are other types of hurdy gurdies as well, like this Hungarian variant, which I posted to show that there are other types of hurdy gurdies, and that one does not need to be a guy in a beard to play the thing:

By now you are probably noticing something: yesterday (or the day before, I don't remember), it was bagpipes. Today hurdy gurdies. What is the connection? Hurdy gurdies sound like a hybrid between the fiddle and the bagpipe because of?

Yes. Drones. Keilholtz likes droning instruments.

First person to comment "that is why he drones on and on so" gets a fat lip.

And finally, enjoy this rather primitive, yet good sounding hurdy gurdy with a Russian tune: