Musician and Appalachian Mountain Dulcimer Maker
I am often asked how long it takes me to make a dulcimer. The answer is that I don’t really know. Someday I will figure it out. I do know that I am not making very much per hour!
Here are some of the things that require my time before making a dulcimer.
Design – It took [...]
This information applies to dulcimers as well as any wooden stringed instrument.
Wood, no matter how well seasoned, will continue to expand and contract with changes in humidity.
One of the primary causes of damage to stringed instruments is dehydration. An instrument can dry out in a remarkably short period of time. As the wood becomes dry [...]
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
- Mevlana Jellaludin Rumi
Lutherie requires precision work with a material that prefers to bend and sway with the weather!
I have learned that it is better to accommodate the will of the wood then to force it to meet my demands. I have tried both approaches and have learned that the will of the wood always wins!
Working with the [...]
Posted in Dulcimer, Hammered Dulcimer, Lutherie, Music on Jul 31st, 2009
I find instrument making and playing to be intimately linked together. I enjoy doing both equally. Sometimes I lean more one way than the other for a while but the focus always swings back and forth and more or less balances itself out.
I also find myself focused on different instruments as well and the same [...]
Perhaps a better title for this post would be “I Do Better Work When Tools Are Sharp!”
The other day I found myself enjoying working at the bench less that I usually do. I was having a hard time clamping a dulcimer firmly enough to the bench so that I could plane the fingerboard flat.
At that [...]
Sandpaper is an amazing and versatile tool. With sandpaper I can round edges, sculpt smooth, curved surfaces and fix the occaisional “oops” left behind by an edge tool.
Sandpaper also is great when prepping for finishing. It has set the modern standard of what people expect a surface to look like, for better or for worse.
There [...]
The influence of the back and sides of a dulcimer can effect the sound almost as much as the soundboard.
Over the years I have found that there are no hard and fast rules as to what works best. This goes not only for dulcimer backs but just about everything else too!
I have made dulcimers that [...]
I put a lot of time into choosing which pieces of wood become a finished dulcimer. Sometimes I spend hours deciding which board (or boards) will provide the top, back peghead, fretboard, endblocks and sides for a particular dulcimer.
I am currently working on two walnut dulcimers. One is curly with beautiful red, brown and orange [...]
Adding extra frets to the traditional diatonic dulcimer fret pattern is nothing new. Most common are the 6 1/2 fret and the corresponding 13 1/2 fret an octave higher. These two frets are so common that one could say they have become standard issue on most dulcimers. These two frets are standard on the dulcimers [...]