Hi, everyone! I’m brand new to the site, and was wondering if there are any hammered dulcimer players here? I am getting a MasterWorks DulciForte for my birthday, though it won’t be here until March or April. I have always wanted one, and this year my husband surprised me with this gift! I’m learning all I can about it, including finding a community of other players. We are also getting two Colin Goldie soprano D flutes and a Goldie Tendor D flute. It’s going to be noisy in our house!
Your idea of a noisy house sounds wonderful. i do have a hammer dulcimer, graduation gift to myself after going back to school post young children. I haven’t played since we moved four years ago, bigger house but no room to leave it set up 24/7
Judy, what a lovely graduation gift. Congratulations to you! I think I’m going to have to put mine in my bedroom, next to my big Kawaii electric piano. I want to be able to leave it out so I can just sit down/stand and play any time I feel like it. My hubby has good noise-cancelling headphones which will come in handy!!
I used to be obsessed with hammered dulcimers! This was twenty-five years ago, and I couldn’t come close to affording a nice one. In the end I acquired blueprints and built several of them in different styles. Lots of fun and a nice challenge. My favorite I still have. It’s designed with a floating sound board made from old growth redwood, and has pedal dampers. Plays like a dream. My other attempts I don’t love as much. I used African Mahogany for the soundboards and they are fixed (glued to the pin blocks in the more common fashion). I got ambitious in making a chromatic version, which I found much trickier to master. These are one of the coolest instruments.
But I haven’t played them in years because (like everyone) I found that if you live in a small house a hammered dulcimer takes up a lot of space!
I understand the “obsession”! I have wanted one since high school. How wonderful that you made your own! Your expertise with wood and creating musical instruments has served you well! I have a feeling that when I actually see how big the instrument is, I may have to move other furniture around to accommodate it!
I signed up for the QuaranTUNE Winter Festival, and am taking several beginner classes. I figure I might as well learn as much as I can while I wait for my instrument to arrive. Coming from a piano background, the layout makes a lot of sense. But putting it into practice will be the big challenge!
I love the hammered dulcimer! It was the first instrument I ever wanted to play. I had cassette tapes of Tony Elman and listened to them until they were wearing out.
I do play, a little, and amateurishly. One of my personal pet peeves with instructional recordings is the way the instructors start out by saying “I have a lot more strings on mine than you probably have on yours, please ignore that and try to figure out where I’d be if I was playing your instrument.” How hard would it be for a teacher recording an instructional video to just borrow a standard 2-bridge instrument? Really?
I have been trying mostly to put renaissance dance music on the dulcimer. I am an in-again, out-again member of the SCA and keep trying to get music and dancing happening. And people say they love the idea, but nobody shows for dance practice and it falls apart. Still, the dulcimer seems to fit wonderfully with the sound of the music, even if some of the music is hard to fit on the dulcimer. (Some minor keys mean reaching a good distance to get an important note, for example. If that note is even available on the dulcimer. Mine isn’t chromatic.)
Since I play a couple of other instruments with very limited scales, I have a personal view that sometimes the charm is in the limitations. I’m happy with the idea of having to substitute a harmony note when the one that’s called for doesn’t exist on my instrument. (Finnish kantele has 5 notes - there are larger kantelet, but the basic one is 5; Anglo-Saxon lyre has 6 notes; highland bagpipe has 9 notes.) I believe the limitations are permission to dig deep in an instrument’s potential, since it can’t go wide. But I’m just a middle aged man who likes to mess around with music, not a high-level player. I’m not an authority, just an enthusiastic amateur.
In terms of the hammered dulcimer I completely agree–I made a chromatic version to give me greater range, but I didn’t like it anything as much as my more limited version. There is a lot of sense in the non-chromatic designs because they seem to focus on harmonies, and since the whole thing resonates in sympathy to some degree, I always felt that the chromatic version didn’t feel quite as harmonious when playing some of those “in between” notes.