Harspiel

The Harspiel (フェシュピール Feshupiiru) is the most popular instrument among nobles because it provides a musical base for learning other instruments. Nobles are required to learn the harspiel. It is quite expensive, so normally no other people besides nobles can play the harspiel.

There are children-sized harspiels which have less strings and are smaller in general. The tone-range is about half as large as the adult-sized harspiel. Practice instruments may have a different coloured string, that marks the fundamental note.

Appearance
The harspiel is shaped like a cut-open pear, the body being the round part and the neck looking like a fingerboard, the long part. The neck is long and straight and ends with a wooden decoration shaped like a horse's head. There is a hole on the front side resembling that of an accoustic guitar, which is ornamentally arranged. The harspiel has around fifty to sixty strings, which are strung onto pins, that are located near the horse decoration. Each string represents a half-stone and are arranged like a piano's keyboard.

How to play
The harspiel is played with the player sitting. The instrument is put on one's lap with the instrument's neck resting on the upper part of one's non-dominant arm (e.g. left). The dominant hand (e.g. right) plugs the higher sounding strings around the sound hole, producing the melody part, while the non-dominant hand plugs the deeper sounding strings to create a bass line around the neck.

Trivia

 * The harspiel looks like a combination of a lute and a harp, and most similar to the Eastern European instrument, the Bandura.
 * In Ascendance of a Bookworm we only see right-handed harspiel (player). There may be no left-handed version.
 * The instrument gets heavier the more diagonally it is held.