A few months back I posted about how I’d purchased a Finnish kantele (direct from Finland). It was by way of avoiding getting back to playing my harps, and I entertained myself noodling away on the five strings of my kantele for months. At the moment I have both harps back in circulation, but I still reach for the little kantele. It’s ‘no brain’ music for me, and I play it when I want to re-focus from some task (usually editing).
Here is my little kantele. It is tuned to a pentatonic scale. That is like the black notes of a piano. The notes are whole tones and so every string fits nicely with every other. You can’t play two dissonant notes when you’re tuned pentatonically (providing you’re in tune!). I noodle away, and most of my tunes sound more or less the same. I make them up every time, but there are only 5 strings, and I seem to make the same patterns, so my kantele playing always sounds something like this (with apologies for the terrible recording quality from my iPhone’s voice memo app). Here are 30 seconds of the 2 minutes I uploaded (not sure what happened to the other 1:30 minutes!)
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I’m feeling all techo savvy, having uploaded my very first youtube ‘video’! lol This is a still photo with audio uploaded. I will see what I can do about actually filming something eventually. 😉
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Shawn L. Bird 
It’s a beautiful sound. I love playing and composing songs in the pentatonic scale on my piano, there is something very magical about it, as you say because there are no dissonant notes. Reminds me of the chimes of a clock. Thanks for sharing this 🙂
Yes, I agree. It is a tuning frequently used for patients in harp therapy. When an actual harp is tuned to pentatonic, a patient can play forever and absorb all those beneficial sound waves.
I would listen to more, and you could call the piece ‘Bow Ties’.
lol and then I could branch into spaghettini and ravioli… 😉
Very beautiful.
lol. Thanks