Bouzouki

Step into a world where the spirits are serenaded by a magical instrument that sends out wave after wave of alluring tones to tempt and turn the passerby, making them answer the call and swim within this beautiful sound. Suspend your own silly musical misgivings and spread your arms to grab at the air, bouncing into the night the heart you have kept locked up for far too long. The bouzouki is a musical instrument in the lute family, with a pear-shaped body and a long neck. A mainstay of modern Greek music, the front of the body is flat and is usually heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The instrument is played with a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. In Greece, there had been an instrument known as the pandura or pandourion, also called the "trichordo" because it had three strings; it was the first fretted instrument known, forerunner of the various families of lutes worldwide. The source of our knowledge about this instrument is the Mantineia marble (4th century BC, now exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens), depicting the mythical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, where a pandouris is being played by a muse seated on a rock. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=115393