I finally got my new ronroco from Bolivia. I call it my guitaroco because I changed the strings so that I can play it like a guitar.
When I was 15, I bought a guitar and began teaching myself to play it. I thought of my guitar as a friend and took it with me everywhere I could. When I went to college, I took lessons in classical guitar. I also began playing guitar at church and became very involved in music ministry. Through the years, I carried my guitar with me so much, people asked if it was an appendage. Now advance 40 years. I have PD and my shoulders hurt reaching around a full size guitar. My left pinky finger sometimes curls up and doesn’t reach as far as it used to. My guitar feels so heavy to carry. I start looking at smaller stringed instruments and that is how I came to play my guitaroco. I still play my guitar, but it is nice to have a smaller instrument that is easily carried and that I can play for longer periods of time than my guitar.
I am very happy with my ronroco, but it was trial and error finding the perfect small instrument. First I bought a renaissance guitar. I thought it would be more unique to play a replica of a guitar from the 16th century than to just play a small guitar. My renaissance guitar is very nice, but it is very fragile, hard to tune, and hard to amplify loud enough for an audience. I next tried a mandolin, but I did not like the steel strings on a mandolin. Then I found a South American instrument called a charango. It had nylon strings like my classical guitar, but it was smaller than a mandolin and a little too small to play everything I wanted to play. The ronroco is a larger version of the charango. The first ronroco I bought was of a poor quality and some of the notes were out of tune. I ordered a new ronroco from South America and waited 4 months for it. I think it is the perfect small instrument. My ronroco is different than a guitar in that it has pairs of strings. This produces a harp like sound and I have found that Irish harp music sounds very nice on ronroco. Here is a piece by an Irish harper who lived in the 1600’s named Turlough O’Carolan. This is called Carolan’s Concerto.
