I got a lyre! I’ve been plucking away on it all week and having fun. So, rather “compose” a song in the traditional sense (since I still don’t entirely know what I’m doing), what you’re hearing/seeing here is off the cuff improvisation. This was one of those improv sessions where things just kind of worked out and I was happy enough to turn it in as is.
Also, I rarely make videos so you'll see me moving the camera around mid performance haha. You might also see me fret and pluck the guitar in some instances and there was no sound, reason being that I played an errant note that was outside of the key of A minor that sounded bad so I clipped and muted the audio there. Anyways, hope you enjoy!
‹ Song Notes/Experience so far learning the lyre
Let me first say tuning this thing SUCKS lol. Normally on a guitar when you put on new strings, you have to tune all 6 strings and then start over again because the first string you tuned is now most likely flat as it adjusted to the tension on the bridge. So you end up tuning the strings in like 3 passes, play the instrument for a while, and then have to tune it again as the strings have been stretched and knocked out of tune.
Now imagine doing that for 19 strings. OOF.
Once the tuning bit was out of the way, the first challenge I encountered that I was trying to wrap my head around is that the lowest string is furthest away from you and the highest strings are closest, the opposite of the guitar. So I had to rewire my brain a bit to think that when I’m plucking away from myself I’m moving lower and if I’m playing towards myself I’m moving higher up the scale. But this didn’t take too long to get down, just a few days of messing around.
The biggest challenge though, for me personally at least, is that the lyre is a diatonic instrument - meaning that it’s tuned to a specific key. You can’t play accidentals on it. If you’re pretty familiar with my music at this point, you know that I tend to change key signatures a lot or borrow spicy chords from other keys pretty frequently. One of my go tos is typically playing a major chord and then the same chord as a minor chord (C major to C Minor, for example). You can’t do that on the lyre. You can tune the strings to different notes but you have to do a lot of planning around what exactly you’re writing on it. And as I stated earlier, tuning the lyre is a lengthy process and maybe not worth changing keys all the time.
But this ended up being a cool limitation for me. All the instruments I play are capable of chromatic music. I’ve never played a diatonic instrument before. Being forced to have to write around a instrument that’s incapable of leaving C major/A minor was actually kind of fun and had me thinking more critically of which notes to use on guitar.
Oh, and as for the guitar, it’s in the Mando tuning that I came up with back for Prie Dieu (D-G-D-A-A-E). That tuning has since been used on Royal Rat Authority and The Alluring Shine so it’s been making its rounds this year.
Lastly, I also bought a Tin Whistle recently and I’m currently learning how to play that. I’d love to include it on some music in future weeks (I recorded some tin whistle for this song but not enough to warrant its inclusion and I was also making accidental honks between notes, lol)
