What is "timple"

n. A traditional musical instrument of the Canary Islands and Murcia. It usually has five strings, but some have four. It is similar in size to a ukulele but has a distinctive semi-round back. A common tuning for five-string timple is A/D/F#/B/E.

The timple (or more correctly tiple, meaning "treble") is a traditional 5-string plucked string instrument of the Canary Islands.

In La Palma island and in the north of the island of Tenerife, many timple players omit the fifth (D) string, in order to play the timple as a four-string ukulele, though this is considered less traditional by players and advocates of the five-string version. The players of the four-string style, in return, say that they are simply playing the timple in the old-fashioned way from before the time when a fifth string was introduced in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The common tuning is GCEAD.

Timple players (timplistas or tiplistas) of note are Benito Cabrera from Lanzarote, José Antonio Ramos and Totoyo Millares from Gran Canaria, and Pedro Izquierdo from Tenerife.