After the Second World War, Walter Mittman, a primary school teacher in Westphalia, popularized the conventional triangular bowed psaltery, which had earlier been advocated for use in education by the German Edgar Stahmer (1911–1996).

Chromatic bowed psalteries have the sharps and flats on one side and the diatonic notes on the opposite.

It is a psaltery in the traditional sense of a wooden sound box with unstopped strings over the soundboard.

It significantly differs from the Medieval plucked psaltery only in that its strings are arranged to permit bowing.

The strings are often too closely spaced for conventional finger picking, but may be plucked at the bowing end.