Bouzouki the "tetrachordo" ("four-course") has four pairs of strings. The name "bouzouki" comes from the Turkish word "bozuk", meaning "broken" or "modified", and comes from a particular re-entrant tuning called "bozuk düzen", which was commonly used on its Turkish counterpart, the "saz-bozuk". It is in the same instrumental family as the mandolin and the lute. Originally the body was carved from a solid block of wood, similar to the saz, but upon its arrival in Greece in the early 1910s it was modified by the addition of a staved back borrowed from the Neapolitan mandola, and the top angled in the
Bouzouki better suited to the kind of virtuoso playing he was famous for. Today, the tetrachordo is the most common bouzouki used in Greek music, though a few traditionalists still prefer the trichordo, particularly for the older "rebetika" style of playing. In addition to developing the modern tetrachordo bouzouki, Manolis Hiotis was a pioneer the use of amplification for the instrument, which he may have been using as early as 1945. However, the earliest documented use of amplification for the bouzouki comes from a 1952 photograph, showing Vasilis Tsitsanis and Yiannis Papaioannou playing bouzoukis, each with an electric guitar-style pick-up attached