h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello Gnomon!

I was just today approached by Ferdia Mac Anna who has been given an Irish bouzouki and wants some instruction; he already plays a bit of guitar so I told him he can already do enough to make the transition, but he wants to come along anyway so I'm seeing him on Thursday. I told him I never played bouzouki, though I have made some for Christy Moore and Donal Lunny (Christy never played his in public but he did describe the one he bought as 'shit hot').

Enough of the name dropping. Wanting to check on current bouzouki tunings, I read your Entry which is pretty hot itself: right to the point

I would recommend a little change: rather than 'an Irish guy', I would describe Johnny Moynihan as 'an Irish musician'. He told me that he had brought his first bouzouki home from Greece and used it in Sweeney's Men because he thought its plangent quality suited Irish music.

This was in the sixties rather than seventies: it is listed in the lineup of their 1968 album

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeney%27s_Men_(album)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKExPzTWFJU&list=PLZlpB-OQOljt76YQKHJ4TcsYhkezZt3Br

and Andy's bio mentions Johnny introducing the Greek bouzouki to them in 1966
http://www.andyirvine.com/bio/chapter3.html

Pretty soon Johnny abandoned the Greek tuning (C3C4 F3F4 A3A4 D4D4) for GDAD and strung it more heavily. When the round-backed Greek instrument broke under the strain he followed Donal Lunny's lead in using a flat-backed custom 'Irish bouzouki'. I'm pretty sure Andy and Donal were using bouzoukis well before Alec Finn, though he was of a similar age. His Wiki entry says "Finn took up the bouzouki in the 1970s. In contrast to most Irish players, he played a round-backed Greek bouzouki, one of the older-style trichordo three course (six string) instruments tuned DAD".

I learned to make Irish bouzoukis from Andy Manson in Sussex in 1977. To bear the enormous strain players like Donal put them under (he used the heaviest strings possible, putting on new strings for every performance) Andy Manson would put a truss rod of half-inch square section steel into the neck. The Greek bouzouki had no such mass in it, which accounts for it constantly going out of tune on Johnny.

I'm not suggesting you put all this in, but it would be nice to record Johnny's use of the word 'plangent'.

Thanks R, that's great information. It's very hard to find anything reliable on the web about the Irish bouzouki. Nobody recorded it at the time, and while most of the main players are still around, they're too busy playing to be updating wikipedia etc.

I now have two bouzoukis, a Greek trichordo DAD and a cheap German-made Irish bouzouki GDAD. I haven't really matered either of the yet.

That entry has been changed now. How did you get on with Ferdia?

Great. He's an interesting guy: he is the original Rocky de Valera, some pedigree! We agreed that he should buy a strap, use a pick, and be prepared to use his little finger for fretting more than you would on guitar. Then we had coffee and exchanged CDs. I must get one to you, of Brother Slim (Malachy and Aoife's band)
http://www.facebook.com/Brother-Slim-1011250709071487/

Traditional Greek bouzouki players use trichordo (three-course) instruments and play the melodies entirely on the two treble courses which are tuned a fourth apart. They use 1st finger for two frets and other three fingers for one fret each, but this only gives them an octave and a fourth before they have to move their hand. They do a lot of moving the hand up and down the neck.

Modern Greek bouzouki players have the tetrachordo instruments tuned like a guitar so I presume they use guitar fingering.

I haven't found any definite statement about Irish Bouzouki players - many of them seem to use a capo so that they can play up the neck where the frets are closer together, but that seems to spoil the point of having a long-scale instrument.