r/HurdyGurdy

I recently started looking for a hurdy-gurdy as a Christmas present and found several unusually inexpensive listings on Etsy.

After researching them, I discovered that the photographs appear to match instruments previously published by established hurdy-gurdy makers and other sellers. In some cases, the original instruments were priced five to ten times higher than the Etsy listings.

This raised serious concerns for me. I am sharing this information so that potential buyers can examine the evidence and make their own decisions.

It is also worth checking where the photographs were originally published and whether the seller has a verifiable history of making hurdy-gurdies.

I will provide the comparison links and original sources in a comment below.

Has anyone purchased from one of these shops or been able to verify that the sellers actually possess the instruments shown?

Would love to hear other people's experience with amplifying their hurdy gurdies. I have an NG basic that I attached a K&K piezo to, with some super cool results. Recently I've been experimenting with effects pedals. Listening with headphones, I can get some super cool sounds by messing with reverb, delay, and distortion units, and I'm excited to hear if anyone else has found cool noises doing something similar.

One issue I've run into is that the gurdy is EXTREMELY prone to feedback. When I run it "clean" through the amp, its pretty manageable as long as I stand in the right orientation and dont turn up too loud. But at higher volumes or with any real distortion/reverb/gain, its immediate feedback city, no matter what I do. This seems like a pretty common problem with piezo mics.

Has anyone else run up against this kind of issue? My research has suggested that a decent preamp designed for piezo-amplified acoustic instruments may be the solution, but they're expensive and I want to be more confident before pulling the trigger.