FLEX SHORT STRINGS

I like the sound of very short strings. They usually don’t have much sustain, and they can have a sort of sweetly comical effect. This little zither has one bank of short strings on front and another on back, randomly tuned. On each side there’s a lever bar for bending the strings as they sound, causing the pitch to bend. A magnetic pickup underlies the strings.

In the audio clip, Flex Short Strings is heard double tracked and with a generous dose of electronic sound processing. In the video linked below, Flex Short Strings appears at around 1:05. Two functionally similar but different looking versions of the instrument are shown in the photos on this page.