Hemp in Music: Strings, Soundboards and Instruments Through History

Before nylon and steel took over, stringed and percussion instruments relied for centuries on sturdy plant fibres. Hemp, valued for its tensile strength and relative stability in humid conditions, held a quiet but lasting place in the making of popular instruments across Europe, long before synthetic materials took hold in the twentieth century. This use is less documented than hemp's broader textile or rope-making history, but it reveals an overlooked side of the fibre.

Why hemp suited musical cordage

Among the plant fibres available before the industrial era — flax, sisal, ramie, hemp — the latter stood out for its high mechanical strength and limited stretch under tension. Two qualities that mattered for musical use: a string that stretches too easily goes slack and loses pitch, while a fibre that is too stiff snaps at friction points. Hemp offered a reasonable compromise for popular instruments, even if it fell short of finely worked animal gut, which remained reserved for refined instruments and professional musicians with larger budgets.

Hemp strings before nylon

Until the nineteenth century, instrument strings were made mainly from animal gut or braided plant fibres, hemp among them. Cheaper than gut and more accessible in hemp-growing regions, hemp strings equipped popular instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy or certain small rustic harps. Their sound, duller and less precise than finely worked gut, suited dance and street music well enough, where carrying volume mattered more than the harmonic finesse sought in chamber music.

The drum tensioned by rope

Percussion put the fibre to a different use: not to vibrate, but to tension a drumhead. Many traditional drums, from the North African bendir to the West African djembe popularised in Europe during the twentieth century, rely on a diamond-pattern network of braided ropes running around the shell to set the skin's tension. Hemp, resistant and less prone to gradual stretching than softer plant fibres, long served for this braiding. It was later challenged by nylon, more consistent over time, and then by metal key or screw tensioning systems on factory-made percussion.

The harp and the hurdy-gurdy, instruments of rural origin

In several rural regions of Europe, the hurdy-gurdy and certain small diatonic harps were built with whatever materials were locally available. Hemp, already grown for rope-making and cloth, naturally found its way into the village luthier's workshop, who did not always have access to the quality gut reserved for urban ateliers. This lineage explains why hemp strings remain associated with popular, communal music — village dances, evening gatherings, rural festivities — rather than with the refined craft of concert instruments.

Hemp inside the shell and body of the instrument

Beyond strings, the fibre also served inside the instrument itself. Some drum and hurdy-gurdy shells were reinforced with glued strips of hemp canvas, a method close to the one used for travel trunks and bags of the period. The purpose was not acoustic but structural: limiting cracks in the wood under the constant tension of the strings and the variable humidity of the barns where these instruments usually lived, far from the stable conditions of an urban lutherie workshop.

Why hemp gave way to nylon and steel

The arrival of nylon in the 1940s, and its wider spread after the war, changed the picture for instrument strings: consistent diameter, predictable pitch, resistance to humidity without special upkeep. Hemp, whose tension shifts with the weather and which needs more frequent restringing, gradually lost its place on most plucked and bowed string instruments. On percussion, the same shift played out with the arrival of mechanical tensioning systems, more reliable than hand braiding but costlier to buy and requiring industrial tooling.

A quiet comeback among contemporary luthiers

Hemp fibre is making a comeback today through a different door: biocomposites. A handful of luthiers and small manufacturers are experimenting with guitar or ukulele bodies made of resin reinforced with hemp fibre, in the same way it is already used in bicycle frames or certain car body panels. The argument is not nostalgia for old strings, but reduced weight and a lighter environmental footprint compared with glass or carbon fibre. These instruments remain marginal and handmade, far from mass production, but they reflect a renewed interest in a fibre long relegated to rope-making and coarse textiles.

What to remember

Hemp held a modest but genuine place in the history of popular European instruments: drum cordage, strings for hurdy-gurdies and rustic harps, reinforcement for wooden shells. Replaced by nylon and steel for practical reasons of stability and upkeep, it is resurfacing today in composite uses closer to materials engineering than to traditional lutherie. One more way for this versatile fibre to cross the centuries without ever quite disappearing.