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

[cellio]

The canonical place to look for hammer dulcimers is Dusty Strings. Which doesn't mean there aren't bunches of fine alternatives out there from individual craftsmen and smaller companies, but their info may be harder to find. Dusty Strings gives you a baseline to look at.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

To my way of thinking, Dusty Strings is the standard that all other manufacturers attempt to surpass, and which all other manufacturers, indeed, do surpass.

I have found their instruments often out-of-tune (as in, the bridge isn't set at a perfect fifth), and weak-voiced.

I'm partial to the Songbird dulcimers by Chris Foss, in particular the "Wren" (13/12 size, solid wood top). The weirdest drawback is that Foss' company sends little fundamentalist "Chick Publications" cartoon tracts with their instruments.

[cellio]

Thanks for the recommendation!

To my way of thinking, Dusty Strings is the standard that all other manufacturers attempt to surpass, and which all other manufacturers, indeed, do surpass.

Entirely possible. My Dusty Strings dulcimer is coming up on 17 years old, so I can't speak to current quality of either their or their competitors'. When I was shopping for one I went to a large music store some distance from here (House of Musical Traditions in Tacoma Park, MD) and spent much quality time with the dozen or so different dulcimers they had before choosing. Some years later I ran across dulcimers from Griffin's Den (no longer in business to the best of my knowledge), and they were very nice -- would have bought one back then had it been an option, but I wasn't ready to buy a second one. Anyway, I know there are good dulcimers out there that are not "national brands", so to speak; I just don't know how to guide someone through the option space systematically. Recommendations are the way to go, methinks.

So lyev (or anyone else), if you do go dulcimer-hunting you should check out Songbird.