When I practice playing this zither, my IMAGINATION (and creativity, an attribute of my design engineering career) pops up and I think about making an instrument similar to the concert zither, except the accompaniement part only needs about 6 strings like a guitar (iwth a separate neck), and I could design a electro mechanical device, micro-processor controlled, which has one pin for each string & fret slots for the first 5 ot 7 fret position. A set of pedals (one chord per pedal) and the microprocessor will translate the contact of each pedal to a set of pins corresponding to a chord. This way, one can play melody and simply swipe the accompaniement strings to produce the right chord (as if there is a second guitar player). This device can be certainly used on a normal guitar so that one can play leads / melody along with chords without too much hassles. One just need to finger the frets for the melody on trebble strings and the lower strings (pressed down for proper chords by the device) can be plucked or strummed to produce the chord (selected by stepping on the proper pedal).
WAY TOO MUCH FROM MY IMAGINATION but I am certain it is doable. And someone could file a patent for this design if it does not exist yet.
Then I found something called the "autoharp" which has chord buttons !!!. I did some look up on it and watch a couple youtube video and understood how this chord mechanism works. Pretty simple.
It looks like the easiest instrument to play (at least the strumming part, the melody part is kind of tricky but not that hard) while the concert zither is on the other end from the difficulty scale !!!
This afternoon, I had a chance to see , touch and try one 21-chord auto harp, first time ever, and I strummed it so easily to some usual chord sequence, it sounds sweet.
Oh Oh, MIAS ( musical instrument AS kicks in again), but I resist myself from buying that one.
It has 36 strings and takes about 30 minutes to tune it.
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