nono, this toy is *much* nicer.

My cittern arrived from Sweden last week, 10 strings of awesome shipped in a very, very robust case.

I haven't gotten around to recording it yet, let alone recording it next to its colleagues which will be moving on to their next homes; not that it matters, since I'm not exactly competent at any of them.

It's amazing.

It's beautiful, to start with. I ordered it from Mats Nordwall (a Swedish luthier who's well-known in the right circles) about a year ago, but didn't get to play one until a few weeks ago, when Timbre Folk & Baroque in Berkeley happened to have one of his more economical mahogany citterns in stock. The sound was what I've heard in my years of watching and listening to Esbjörn Hazelius recordings. He's playing the same instrument, only he's good at it.

You wouldn't know it from the house, but I actually only buy the instruments I need in order to have the sounds I want. I bought a cheapie electric guitar when I wanted to get into that, and then I replaced it with a Line 6 Variax that will mimic almost any electric guitar to my satisfaction, and donated the cheapie to a local school. I have a tenor guitar, a mandolin, a little solid-bodied mandolin, because of the sounds they make.

(Well, mostly. I bought the mandolins because earlier in my violin career, I wanted something tuned the same as a violin, but easier to play. I'm keeping the acoustic, and the electric is decorative, and not worth the hassle of selling.)

I expect to own more guitars because the Variax's acoustic mimicry is far short of its electric, so a 12-string guitar and some sort of smaller-bodied guitar would be nice.

It turns out there's a few things that make it such a distinctive sound:

• It's common for instruments with paired strings to have the lower pairs be one pitched high, and the other an octave below it; for some reason, Swedes use a classical guitar string (nylon wrapped with silver) for the lower-pitched string. So of course it sounds different.
• This reduces the total string tension, so they can build the soundboard with fewer stiffening braces, which means it has more freedom to vibrate.
• The lighter build means you can use a capo really, really far up the neck: usually, instruments will lose their resonance if you capo them above maybe the 5th fret, because physics.
• (Not that you shouldn't do it, because it can be just what you want, but you'll lose complexity and sustain.)
• My cittern's sound doesn't change much until maybe the 10th fret.
• If you capo your instrument up really high, it's reasonable to expect it will go a little out of tune and you'll just have to tune it for the higher position. My cittern...does not have this problem.

It's literally everything I hoped it would be. I am very pleased.