Kantele

Say hello to our instruments! 

Kantele is Finland's national instrument. It is quite old, probably over 2000 years old. The oldest model has 5 strings (or a bit more or less) and we didn't need any more strings until in the late 18-hundreds: our oldest traditional music didn't need any more notes. When more modern dancing music, like walse and polska reached Finland, more and more strings were added to kantele when needed.

Here you can see Leeni's concert kantele, it has 38 strings. All of us have similar concert kanteles, and we randomly take one of them with us on a gig. If I would have to guess, it might be most often mine (Anna's) or this Leeni's kantele but probably it's quite equal!

The 38-stringed concert kantele (with is damping board down)

About a half of the strings (22, if I counted right) are steel strings and the bass strings are wound copper strings. I've understood there's a silk fibre inside the copper strings but I might be wrong! We mostly use this bass aspect of the concert kantele because it's so coool! The coolest bass in the world! Of course because kantele is objectively the best instrument in the whole world.

Steel and copper strings (with the damping board up)

Here is the mechanism of the concert kantele. Each string is attached to a metal tube, for example all the c-strings are attached to the same one. You can make all the c's (in the same time, always) c sharp or c flat by turning the mechanism (those brown things). The first lever on the photo is now c flat, the second is d and the third is e sharp. F, g , a and b levers are all flat. A nice mode, haha!

You could say that concert kantele has all the white keys of the piano, and when you use it's levers you can replace a white key with a black key.

Mechanism of the concert kantele

Then we have four 15-stringed kanteles, all of us have our own on the gig. This is again Leeni's instrument. This model has actually 11 "melody" strings from a to d2 and 4 accompaniment strings, usually tuned to a, a, d and D. These kantele are diatonic instruments, so we'll have to tune each time we want to change the key. For example when tuned in D major, this kantele has all the notes of D-major in order (a, b, c#, d, e, f#, g, a, b, c# and d). It makes our lives easier that we don't all play in the same song, so we can keep them in different keys.

15-stringed kantele

Kantele is an ancient instrument from the time when the world was a lot more quiet. All our instruments are acoustic but they have microphones inside. This is obviously quite nice on the amplified gigs.

More information about kantele you can find from our website: http://kardemimmit.fi/en/kantele.html

Feel free to ask, we'd be happy to answer!

Anna/mimmit