Cross tuning if played in regular tuning, while the sounded pitch is altered. Cross tuning is commonly used on the fiddle in folk music of Appalachia, the southern United States and Scandinavia. The fiddle may be re-tuned in any number of ways in these musical idioms, but there are two common re-tunings. While the standard tuning for open strings of the violin is GDAE—with the G being the tuning of the lowest-pitched string and the E being the tuning for the highest-pitched string—fiddlers playing tunes in the key of D major sometimes employ a tuning of ADAE. In this tuning the open
Cretan lyra plates was reported in 2006. The old model of the Cretan lyra (also called "lyraki" ~ small lyra), is tuned 5-1-4. That is, the middle string is the lowest in pitch and the others are a 4th and a 5th above it. The performer plays the melody on the 1st and 3rd string, using the 2nd string as a drone (Magrini 1997), similarly to the Byzantine lyras from ca. 1190 AD, found in the excavations of Novgorod (Anthony Baines, 1992). The contemporary lyra modelled after Stagakis' design is tuned in fifths to (d-a-e'), and like the violin, it uses no