The kozobas is a new kind of folk double bass: from the late 1960s it appeared in various folk ensembles and troisti muzyky trios. On the kozobas one person can replace an entire rhythm section. The resonator is made as a small drum or a deep wooden tub assembled from staves, its upper opening covered with leather; a long neck extends from the resonator. The instrument is 1.5–2 m tall overall. The strings — one to three (four on modern instruments) — are fixed to a tailpiece at the bottom of the body; they rest on a bridge standing on the leather membrane and are tuned with a worm-gear mechanism on the head of the neck. The head is made in the shape of a goat's head, and a rod carrying a small brass cymbal is attached to it.
The player uses a short straight bow or plucks the strings with the fingers, and may strike the cymbal with a steel rod. The craftsmen who made the first such instruments in the late 1960s — Kasian Yevchenko, then a soloist of the Hryhorii Veriovka Ukrainian Folk Choir, and I. Nikolaichuk, a member of the Kyiv Orchestra of Folk Instruments — told of a Hutsul custom: when the musicians had already left a wedding, the guests put a yoke into a bucket, tied a wire to the bucket's handle and to the upper end of the yoke, and drew sound by striking the wire or rubbing a stick along it. The same device was used to imitate the sounds of a goat during Christmas carolling; it was on this folk and ethnographic basis that the first kozobas was created. The Ukrainian kozobas differs in construction and in the character of its music from the Kashubian “devil's fiddle”, which some took it to imitate. Today the kozobas often appears in Ukrainian ethno-rock bands.
