When listening to music that uses folk instruments, like metal and um...folk, or anything else, what are reliable ways of identifying different instruments? For example, I know Eluveitie uses the hurdy-gurdy yet listening to their music I couldn't tell you which particular instrument is the hurdy-gurdy. Or maybe the opposite is true, where you can recognize the instrument by ear but have no idea what it looks like or it's name. What are your identification methods?

The hurdy gurdy has that windy acoustic sound. I guess listen to that crisp acoustic sound when you are listening. As far as bagpipes, horns, accordions, and instruments like that go, well I dont see a guitar sounding anything like that, so those should be easy to pick out.

It helps to, you know, look up the instruments you're not familiar with. If you want to figure out what a hurdy-gurdy sounds like, for example, why not just poke on over to youtube and type in the instrument's name?

Now let's say for some reason you don't have the album's notes. Maybe you lost them, because I'm sure you're supporting the artists instead of stealing their music. Or hey, maybe the liner notes don't tell you what's getting played. Shame on those bands that do that. But what do you do? You hear a cool sound but can't tell what's making it. Start by identifying which culture the instrument comes from. This shouldn't be too difficult in most cases, and should narrow it down to a scant couple of suspects. Next step, should that fail, is to identify how it makes sound: is it a wind instrument, a stringed one, etc. Either way, with only a couple candidates, you can apply the youtube method one by one until you hear a match.

You can hear the hurdy-gurdy kicking in at exactly 0:09 in this song, and you hear it more clearly at 1:35 and 1:39:

That's odd, I could have sworn that you couldn't embed videos here.

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