Guzheng tuning: the strings, the keys, the bridges

A modern guzheng has twenty-one strings and only five different note names. That sentence contains almost everything unusual about the instrument, and the rest of this page is unpacking it.

Five notes, repeating

The strings are tuned to a major pentatonic: do, re, mi, sol, la. In numbers, which is how guzheng music is actually written, that is 1 2 3 5 6. Then it starts again an octave higher, four times over.

There is no 4 and no 7. Not missing from the notation, missing from the instrument. No string on a guzheng is tuned to fa or ti.

The standard tuning, string by string

In D, a twenty-one string instrument runs from D2 at the bottom to D6 at the top. Lowest string first:

• 1 D2
• 2 E2
• 3 F♯2
• 5 A2
• 6 B2
• 1 D3
• 2 E3
• 3 F♯3
• 5 A3
• 6 B3
• 1 D4
• 2 E4
• 3 F♯4
• 5 A4
• 6 B4
• 1 D5
• 2 E5
• 3 F♯5
• 5 A5
• 6 B5
• 1 D6

The number in front is the jianpu degree, which is what a player reads off the page. The letter name is there for anyone coming from a keyboard.

Four octaves is a wider range than a violin and wider than most of the instruments on this site. It is the range of a small piano, using five notes.

The coloured strings

Most guzhengs colour some strings green, or occasionally red. They are the same string material, and the colour is a road sign. Traditionally the coloured strings mark one particular degree so your eye can find its place on a board of twenty-one nearly identical strings without counting from the end.

Which degree gets coloured varies by maker and by region, so check your own instrument rather than a photo of someone else's. What does not vary is the purpose: it is a landmark, not a different note.

The movable bridges

Each string sits over its own wooden bridge, and the bridges are not glued down. Sliding one along the soundboard changes where the string's speaking length starts, which changes its pitch.

That is how a guzheng is tuned and also how it changes key. Move the bridges and a D instrument becomes a G one. It takes time and a tuner, and a player does not do it mid-piece.

Getting the missing notes back

Here is the part that makes the instrument what it is. The left hand presses down on a string on the far side of the bridge. That raises the tension and bends the pitch up.

Press the mi string a little and you get fa. Press the la string harder and you get ti. So the two notes the tuning leaves out are available on demand, and they arrive bent into place rather than simply appearing.

That is why guzheng melodies sound like they are sliding and sighing. The ornament is not decoration added to the note, it is how the note is produced. A player who only plucks the open strings is playing an instrument with five notes; a player using the left hand has all seven and everything in between.

You can hear the two press strings on our browser guzheng, which marks them.

What the tuning costs

Of a hundred public-domain melodies in our catalogue, a standard D guzheng can play ten. Not one of them is refused for range, since four octaves covers everything. Every single refusal is a tune that wanted a fourth or a seventh somewhere.

The counting is on the guzheng repertoire page. The theory of why five notes behave the way they do is on pentatonic scales.