Centore Bandura

05/14/2026

The tuning pins on a bandura are one of the biggest contributors to its weight - individually they don’t weigh that much, but then you multiply that number by 62! I’ve been working on a super lightweight tuning pin made of titanium with the bottom drilled out which weighs less than half of what a standard steel tuning pin weighs. This should reduce the instrument weight by almost half a pound!

I’ve also opted to use a much tighter thread, so the tuning pin doesn’t move as far downward with each turn. This should make it easier to get the correct final string termination height.

04/02/2026

I was featured on Espreso.tv!!

My part of the video starts at 6:39

The auto-generated English captions are passable if you need them

Вночі Росія запустила по Україні 339 ударних безпілотників. Зокрема Шахеди, Гербери та дрони інших типів. Повідомляють у Повітряних силах. Українські оборонц...

03/28/2026

We're on to our last week of the Kickstarter campaign – please help out if you can!! Y'all have already gotten to 1.5 prototypes fully funded, and it would be so so amazing to get to 2.

Thank you for all the support 🥰

Help revive production of an instrument which nearly disappeared under the Soviet Union

03/05/2026

I’m doing a Kickstarter!! Help fund the final push to getting Centore Banduras out into the world. Thank you for all the support 💕

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danylo-centore/centore-bandura-reviving-a-ukrainian-instrument/

02/09/2026

Yesterday I visited Valerie and Mark Blessley of BlessleyInstruments.com to learn about the Finnish kantele! Other than banduras and pedal harps, this is the only instrument I’m aware of with a ganged semitone mechanism, and it’s really interesting to see its unique solution to this challenge!

I unfortunately don’t think this can be directly used on a bandura given the substantial additional tension the bars would need to handle without flexing, but maybe it’s worth doing some simulations to validate that…

01/31/2026

These past few months I’ve been focusing mainly on reducing the mass of the switches. In my last bandura, the switches contributed 1.7 lb (0.8 kg) to the weight of the instrument, and to the most acoustically critical part of the instrument (the bridge). With the updated switch design, I’m expecting to more than halve that, which should improve the treble response and make the instrument more comfortable to hold

I’m still having some reliability issues with the smaller design, but it’s getting /close/!

11/09/2025

We had the joy of welcoming Centore Bandura and his new Poltava style bandura earlier this year. This is the second bandura Danylo has crafted, this one with a chromatic string setup and incredible tuning mechanisms!

Sound Escape 18 ✨️ played by Ivan. This clip lets you hear the beautiful sound of this instrument across all the octaves. Blend of microphone and the built-in pickup.

How do you like the sound? Як вам подобається звук нової бандури?

11/09/2025

Sound Escape 19 ✨️Another short experiment on Centore Bandura No.2 from his visit in September.

Dampened harmonics on the basses (with mechs on). This bandura really can do it all. Amazing job by Danylo crafting this instrument.


#українськамузика

05/19/2025

All the strings are on it! 🎉 Fingers crossed that the scroll continues to hold 🤞

The switches aren’t regulated yet but I have at least one switch in each octave working quite well, which shows a lot of promise for the design. I’ll work on that over the next few weeks

The bass switches mostly didn’t work because of casting failures. I manually fixed one and it worked well, but this was very time consuming so I’m going to work on updating the design to reduce the chance of casting failure (most likely plaster wasn’t able to flow into one of the corners when making the mold, so I need to give it an additional hole to do that)

Overall I have a bunch of things to improve for the next iteration but this was a HUGE step forward from Instrument #1!

05/19/2025

It was going so well - until it wasn’t 😭. Looks like the wood at the scroll was softer than ideal (more visible inside it than it was outside) - I clearly need to work on identifying high quality slabs. Flying to CT on Tuesday and was hoping to bring this bandura, so for this repair I’m targeting… function over beauty