rave: hammer dulcimer

[cellio]

tigerbright requested a rave on the hammer dulcimer. (See? I haven't forgotten after all! :-) ) The hammer dulcimer is a nifty instrument -- neat and distinctive sound, adaptable, and not nearly as hard to play as it looks. Really. Don't be scared off by all those strings -- it's a very logical instrument.

One of the nice things about this instrument is that if you correctly play even a naked melody line -- no chords, no ornaments, no fancy frills -- it will sound good, in a way that doing that on a piano doesn't. And then you can add in some of that other stuff and move from sounding good to sounding great. And the dulcimer is a percussion instrument, so some issues that come up with other instruments -- like intonation -- just don't apply. Sure, there are other subtleties, like in how you hold the hammer, but failures there do not result in playing the wrong notes. The dulcimer isn't the magnet that the harp is, quite, but it's pretty easy to sound decent even when you're a beginner. And then there's all sorts of room to do spiffy stuff that will impress you, your friends, and other dulcimer players.

Mind, you do have to tune all those strings, and that kind of sucks. Once an instrument settles in, though, it's not that big a deal for casual play. I've played concerts where I spent more time tuning than performing (and much moreso for recordings), but rehearsal-grade tuning absent wacky weather or long-time neglect takes 15 minutes, maybe 20. That's not bad at all. (As for weather, any wooden instrument is going to be sensitive to changes in temperature and pressure. But the dulcimer seems to be a little worse in that regard than guitars and woodwinds.)

The dulcimer lends itself particularly to diatonic music. For the non-musicians, very loosely that means playing a standard scale without accidentals, like playing C to C using only the white keys on a piano. (Musicians should forgive me the over-simplification.) Now if you're playing folk music, or even renaissance music (the types of music I most often play), there are certain accidentals that you need to add in and they're in useful places on the dulcimer. So really, if you're not trying to play some of the wacky 20th-century stuff, it works. And you can play very complex music on the dulcimer, though you're more limited than on a keyboard because you only have two hammers versus ten fingers. For those who know the piece: I once had Earl of Salisbury Pavane -- all of it minus about three notes -- up to performance level. It was high-maintenance, though, so it didn't stick around. Should have recorded it first; oh well.

Oh, and using hammers does not require the same kind of dexterity that playing many other instruments does, which has two implications: first, people who have problems with dexterity, like from arthritis, may find the dulcimer easier to play, and second, you can impress the hell out of people by playing very very quickly.

Comments

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

I tried the hammer dulcimer but, with poor depth perception and hand-eye issues, was hitting between the strings more than I was hitting the strings. So I moved to the harp (and have been happy since). I just need to start making more time for her.

S

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

I also personally like snuggling into my instrument rather than sitting formally at it, do you find that too? (hello fellow harper, btw!)

[cellio]

I am not trying to lure you away from the harp, of course, but I'd just like to point out that while I might not be the poster child for poor depth perception, I'm in the running. :-) So you could do it too, if you didn't have more important and appealing things to be doing.