American qin player/scholar John Thompson advocates for both silk + nylon-wrapped metal strings for different styles of qin music (much like classical (nylon-string) and steel-string guitar music).
"Gnawa always had their trades," Abdullah El-Gourd was quick to tell me. "Not like now. Then you were a carpenter, a metal smith, a mason, everyone had their job. And you were also a Gnawi. Now people make being a Gnawi into a profession. It's even on their carte nationale (national identity cards).
Multi-instrumentalist, multi-talented avant-garde folk artist Arto Tuncboyaciyan, and Singer Serj Tankian, team up for an improvisational, innovative, medley of rock/jazz,metal/Armenian/Turkish/African/Chinese/Japanese kaleidoscopic music...
"One of the best cantaores, thanks to his ability to innovate, his mastery of all the palos (forms), both festive and solemn, and his "magnificent vocal chords made of excellent flamenco metal" (José Manuel Gamboa).
A place to buy decent djembes, goatskins, shells, and a fine metal gripper-puller thingie that saves your hands when pulling ropes on your "mali weave." Some good links, too.
Six of the seven songs in "Qin Show" use silk strings created using ancient techniques discovered only a year ago, thus maintaining historical accuracy in its timbre. The last song of the album uses steel strings to provide comparison to the sound of the
Why Magnatune is not evil: We work directly with independent musicians world-wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV files. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%. You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member.