This article was spun off from the main article, Several Ways to Sing the Psalms


Singing the Psalms with a Seven String Lyre




The lyre appears many times in the Psalms along with the harp, but the lyre is more ancient and existed before the harp.

The lyre was also smaller and more portable than a harp. David apparently carried around a lyre and played it as he watched over his sheep in the field.

If you want to play music as you sing the Psalms, then you will need to read the text without looking at the instrument. A seven string lyre is so simple and intuitive, you can do just that.


Sections in this article:

The 7 string lyre

When I got my lyre in the mail it was better than I had expected; soon after I took it out of the package and tuned it, I was able to make music just by plucking strings at random.





There are several makers who produce these lyres, the most popular on Amazon at the moment being this one.

But these brand names can disappear. If the link is broken, just do a search for 7 string lyre and you'll find the same item from a different maker. They even have DIY kits.

Most 7 string lyres of this type are in the key of G.

Lyres don't have frets like a guitar, so the notes correspond to the number of strings; seven notes in total. It's a very simple instrument.

The notes are (from low to high) D E G A B D E.

That's the order of notes on this particular lyre which has the thicker strings on the left, like a guitar. Some lyre makers put the strings in the opposite order, but it looks like the body design is identical and the vendors just string them differently. As a guitar player I prefer the thick strings on the left.


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The Pentatonic Scale

This lyre uses the pentatonic scale which is a game changer.

The pentatonic scale has only five notes and is very ancient and seems to exist in all cultures.

Which notes are omitted?

On the Do-Re-Mi scale they would be Fa and Ti; they don't get along with the others in some situations.

The remaining five notes sound great together no matter how you arrange them.

If you play the black keys on a piano you will hear the pentatonic scale in G flat (F sharp).





They just couldn't get along.
The gaps in the black keys are where Fa and Ti would have been. They just couldn't get along with the others.

Here are some familiar tunes in the pentatonic scale:

  • Amazing Grace
  • Swing Home Sweet Chariot
  • Jesus Loves Me This I Know
  • Nothing but the Blood of Jesus
  • Auld Lang Syne
  • Old MacDonald Had a Farm,
  • Mary had a Little Lamb
  • My Girl (The Temptations)

If you're still not sure what the Pentatonic scale sounds like, search the web for My Girl by The Temptations and you will hear a pure Pentatonic scale played twice in a row in the guitar intro and then continue in the background. You won't forget it.

Why would a pentatonic lyre be a game changer?

Because making music on a pentatonic scale comes naturally and intuitively. It will allow you to pluck any string in any order and make music without trying. No note will sound like a mistake because there are no bad notes.

This makes a 7 string lyre even simpler so you can play without looking.

This lyre is perfect for people who have never played a musical instrument.


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Demonstration: Amazing Grace

Lyres are especially helpful in situations where you chant the Psalms silently. The lyre can accompany the chanting in your head and give you a voice.

You can play a lyre with a pick or fingers. I tend to use two fingers and a thumb.

Okay, enough talk. I've already mentioned Amazing Grace, so let me play it for you.

It's such a beautiful song for demonstrating this lyre's potential, I even made a backing track to go with it.

If you want to play this demonstration yourself and impress your friends, here's the mp3 file of the backing track.


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Pentatonic Psalm tones

I have searched the internet for Psalm tones in the pentatonic scale that could be played on this 7 string lyre. It should come as no surprise that such a thing did not exist. Until now.

I spent some time researching Psalm tones and then composed these. I played them on my lyre with the Liturgy of the Hours and made several revisions until I was satisfied with them. Finally I put them on a PDF called Psalm tones for the 7 string pentatonic lyre in the key of G.

The image below is an SVG file so you can pinch out and zoom in, to see details.







The format

This is not an actual music score with five lines. It is more similar to guitar tablature where each line represents a string.

There are seven lines for each of the seven strings, and they are marked with the letter of each note (D E G A B D E) plus their names from the Do Re Mi scale. There is also a red marker for Do.

So you don't have to be able to read music to use this. I wanted this to be as simple as possible and accessible to everyone.

There are five Psalm tones and each one begins on a different note of the Pentatonic scale.

You will need all five Psalm tones for the Psalms and canticles in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, so you can just start with the first one and work your way down to the last one each time.


The three sections

Each Psalm tone has three sections so you can play sentences or groupings of two lines or three lines (just add the third section for three lines).


asterisks and flexes in iBreviary
The Liturgy of the Hours (a.k.a The Divine Office, a.k.a the Breviary) divide the Psalms into smaller sections for chanting.

Some breviaries including the digital iBreviary and Universalis (the app) have special navigation symbols to help identify the number of lines in these sections.

For two line groupings they mark the first line with an asterisk.

For three line groupings they mark the first line with a flex (a.k.a dagger) and the second line with an asterisk.

In the screen shot to the right both stanzas have groupings of two lines (marked with an asterisk) followed by three lines (marked with a flex and an asterisk).


The notes

If you are confused about the notes themselves, the first long note in a section is for most of the words in a line which are chanted on the same note. When you come to the final syllables, use the two black notes and the final hollow note.

The final hollow note will often be assigned to more than one syllable depending on the word.

When the final word happens to be "Jerusalem" or "unsurpassable" you will need to add those extra syllables to make the words sound natural.

The hollow note is also held a little longer than the black notes.

It all becomes natural with repetition over time.


The Hymn

It would be a shame to chant the Psalms, but merely say the hymn because you don't know the tune.

If you are praying the Liturgy of the Hours with either iBreviary or Universalis then you are in luck because on most days they have a hymn that is written in Long Meter. In iBreviary if you scroll to the end of a hymn you will see the tune's name followed by the letters LM or the numbers 8 8 8 8.

An example of Long Meter is the Doxology or Old 100th (Praise God from whom all blessings flow...).

But the Old 100th is not in the Pentatonic scale so you can't play it on this lyre.

I was not able to find any Long Meter hymn tunes in the pentatonic scale, so I created one and added it at the bottom of the Psalm tone sheet.

It's such a simple tune that I wouldn't be surprised if someone else has already come up with it. If you know of an earlier version of this, please let me know. But for now, since I need to give it a name, I've just attached my own name. Here is a piano demo in mp3 for those who don't care for my vocal demo (below) which can be a bit jarring on the ears.

Sometimes a hymn will appear in Common Meter which is followed by the letters CM or the numbers 8 6 8 6.

An example of a Common Meter tune is Amazing Grace which I have mentioned a few times. It is in the Pentatonic scale and can be played on this 7 string lyre. So I would recommend just using that tune whenever you encounter a Common Meter hymn.

Here it is in the 7 string tablature format, but with the actual music notes.




And here is the PDF if you want to print it out.


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Psalm tones demonstration

Here are videos of me playing all five Psalm tones on the lyre, and singing as well.

I chose a portion of Psalm 110 from Sunday Evening Prayer for all five tones because it starts with a grouping of three lines which is followed by sets of two lines.

I always sing the Psalms during prayer time with a very low, almost inaudible voice, but I tried to sing them much louder for the videos, which wasn't as easy as I had thought. And I made a few mistakes reading the text as well.

The screen shot of the text came from iBreviary which I talk about in a section below.














The last video is the Long Meter hymn. This hymn was sung during Easter season.



I have found that if I assign my middle finger to the highest note in the tune, with the index finger on the string below that and the thumb for all the lower notes, the playing will go more smoothly. But as the videos show, I sometimes neglected to do that.





Permissions

Feel free to print this out on your desired paper size. Then trim it and keep it with your lyre or breviary.

The reason I added a copyright at the bottom of the Psalm tones is so that nobody would add one themselves and demand that I stop posting it on my website (who knows, it could happen). But feel free to use this PDF any way you like.



Using this with a tablet and a digital breviary

If you are playing a lyre, you probably don't want to be fiddling with pages in a book.

I imagine most people reading this have already prayed the Liturgy of the Hours (a.k.a. Divine Office, a.k.a. the Breviary) on an electronic device. It is so convenient with no page flipping, no ribbons, and no chance of praying the wrong contents on special days.

That's where the split screen feature on both Android tablets and iPads is really valuable.

I made the Pentatonic Psalm tones PDF in its tall and narrow format so it will fit in a split screen on a tablet. If you print it out, it might make a nice bookmark as well.

The digital breviary I recommend for chanting with a lyre is either iBreviary (the website and the app) or Universalis (the app).

As I mentioned above, iBreviary and Universalis include asterisks and flexes to signify groupings of two or three lines. This is a very helpful feature for chanting the Psalms.

You can go to the iBreviary website or Universalis and download the app.




On an iPad with iBreviary


You can make your own

I made this set of Pentatonic Psalm tones for myself, and thought some folks might find it useful.

Of course, there is no reason to use these Psalm tones if you have the energy and ambition to create your own.

So I have also made a 7_string_tablature.pdf so you can take a pencil and come up with your own creations.

You can also use it to make other simple tunes.

Since the format is the same as mine above with seven lines and all the helpful labels, you don't even need to know how to read or write music.

This is specifically for use on a 7 string Pentatonic lyre in the key of G.



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Practical tips

Here are a few practical tips to help you get the most out of one of these lyres and avoid mistakes.


Tuning

The lyre will not come to you tuned, so you will have to tune it yourself. They usually keep the strings loose and out of tune so they won't snap in transit. But my lowest string was actually tuned much higher than it should have been.

A clip-on guitar tuner is really handy, and they are very cheap. Most guitar tuners have a chromatic tuner option so you can find notes that are not on a guitar. Clip it on the lyre, and it tells you the note from the vibrations.

Tuning a lyre is delicate business, and a slight nudge will send the note up a few steps. So you need to be very careful to not go too sharp and accidentally snap the strings.

Always tune the string from below the note and carefully tighten the tuning wrench clockwise to tune up to the note. Pluck the string before you tighten the tuning peg and use your ears to hear the note and eyes to watch the tuner. If you miss the proper pitch, loosen the string a little and try again.

After you first tune the strings to proper pitch on your new lyre it will take a while for the strings to settle, and they will constantly go flat for the first few hours. This is because the strings are still stretching, and will continue to stretch for a while until they settle.

Even while you are tuning, you will find that several strings which were tuned have suddenly gone flat. When the strings are tightened, the tension on the instrument increases and shortens it slightly, so the strings go slack (and flat).

You just have to tune the strings a few times until they stop going flat.

From the day after I tuned it, my relatively cheap lyre stayed in tune better than my acoustic guitars which cost several times more than the lyre.

But some lyres will not stay tuned and you can even see the pegs quickly unwinding by themselves. I read a useful comment that said to just unscrew the peg entirely, and add a drop or two of nail polish remover to it and screw it back in. Apparently that will fix the problem.


String replacement

Fortunately 7 string replacement sets for these lyres have recently appeared on the market.

Make sure you get metal strings with the metal ring-type stoppers (a.k.a. "ball ends"). The nylon strings have no stoppers and will probably be a hassle to fasten (I have not tried it).




The ball ends can be seen in the groove. That white bar is the bridge.


Concerning the actual stringing of the lyre with new strings, you have to first unscrew the tuning pegs a bit so that when you screw them back in to tighten the new strings, the pegs will return to their former height.




The tuning pegs


Also, strings may be much longer than what you would need for a lyre, so you will just have to cut them. Cut the string about two inches past the tuning peg so it will have enough slack to wind around the tuning peg a few times.

Make sure to observe how the old strings were originally attached before you remove them. They should tighten (pitch goes up) by turning them clockwise.

When I got my lyre, the strings had been wound around the pegs by only two wraps, as you can see in the photo above. I would have preferred four or five wraps.

There are ways of anchoring the strings to the pegs, and you can find out more by checking web articles or YouTube videos about how to change guitar strings; the process is the same for lyres and guitars, and there are several ways depending on your personal preference.


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Let's have some fun

Here's a tip that will make you feel like professional musician.

If you tried playing Amazing Grace with the backing track above and want to play more, there are lots of backing tracks on the web to accompany your lyre playing.

Go over to YouTube and do a search for "backing track in the key of G" or "backing track in the key of E minor" which will bring up several videos.

If your lyre is tuned to a different key, then of course look for backing tracks in that key.

Then play along, hitting any random note you like on the lyre.

You will be amazed; every note you play will fit perfectly and sound good (and you will feel good, too).

That's why musicians love the Pentatonic scale for lead solos.


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What about a 10 string lyre?

The Psalms mention a 10 string harp which is why some people prefer ten strings. A 10 string lyre is not as simple to play as a 7 string lyre, and you would have more difficulty playing and reading the Psalms at the same time.

But a 10 string lyre is more versatile if you are up to the challenge.

The most popular 10 string lyre on Amazon at the moment is this one, but again if it is no longer available, the just do a search for 10 string lyre to bring up practically identical ones.

Sets of 10 replacement strings are also available.

The 7 string music tablature in this article would not be applicable to a 10 string lyre, especially since the 7 string lyre is in the key of G rather than in the key of C.

But most of what I wrote about playing the 7 string lyre can be applied to the 10 string lyre, except you would have to skip some strings (the 3rd, 7th and 10th or F and B) when you play Pentatonic tunes.

I have also written an article called Singing the Psalms with a Ten String Lyre.



The videos that disappeared

If you visited this page before and wondered what happened to the videos that used to be here, I moved them to a different page so they wouldn't be lost forever.



First published in March of 2020, last updated on June 20, 2024
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