Title: “Harmonize!”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a five-letter musical instrument.
Answer: BUGLE
Correct entries: 241

Let’s give last week’s meta the SAD (Simple and Difficult) test. Can we describe the whole thing in two reasonably short sentences? How about:

Change one letter in each theme entry to create a musical instrument on both its across and down. Those five changed letters spell BUGLE.

Yep, that’s a SAD meta. I thought the OBOE/BANJO crossing would stick out more than it did. Solvers mostly dug the mechanism but not the spiral shape of the five theme letters, but it was an unfortunate necessity here; as far as I could see, there was no way to make this one work with the five theme entries all going across.

jagoandlitefoot writes:

the E FLAT in DEFLATE was a pretty distracting red herring at first

RPardoe says:

Darn, was hoping it would be KAZOO

Abide has incredible memory recall:

Return of the Ivorian

He means this puzzle from 2016, where you change one letter in IVORIAN and reverse it to get an African capital:

https://crosswordfiend.com/2016/01/10/wsj-contest-friday-january-8-2016/

And finally, docison pulled out a late save:

Was afraid that the music I was hearing was Taps marking the end of my streak!

It wasn’t! The streak survived.

I was aiming for around 375 correct answers for this Week 3 of 5, but just 241 came in, which is right on target for a Week 4 of 5. So I’m ratcheting today’s puzzle down to Week 3 of 5 level, and then we’ll get back on schedule with a Week 5 of 5 next Friday. Calm before the storm!!

A-to-Z Crosswords, Round 2:

I’m really enjoying Peter Gordon and Frank Longo‘s Petite Pangram Puzzles on Kickstarter, and it looks like others are as well since they’re doing a Round 2 of them.

It’s one pangrammatic 9×11 puzzle per day, and I even signed up for the $60 Quick Brown Fox subscription, which means I get to choose an entry that Peter and Frank must fit into a grid. The idea is, of course, to choose as obnoxious an entry as possible, to make it difficult/impossible for them to create a pangram 9×11 that includes it. [Super-sound sleeper’s sound] for ZZZZZZZZZZZ is the obvious try, but I’ll try to find something more clever for my $60. Anyway, highly recommended.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is a four-letter adjective.