dulcimer

The word dulcimer originally referred to a trapezoidal zither similar to a psaltery whose many strings are struck by handheld "hammers". Variants of this instrument are found in many cultures, including: Hammered dulcimer (England, Scotland, United States) Hackbrett (southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland)

The mountain dulcimer's range makes it a good instrument for many different types of music. You'll hear it in folk, classical, jazz, blues, ragtime, Cajun, gospel, and rock and roll. Some areas have special festivals for dulcimer music. This includes the annual Mardi Gras dulcimer music festival.

Here mountain dulcimers are discussed with regard to shape, size, stringing, and fret patterns. The two shapes of dulcimers that are most popular today are the hourglass and the teardrop. Both of these designs derive from older traditional dulcimers. The hourglass comes mainly from the Eastern Kentucky designs of J.

He plays guitar, piano, hammered dulcimer, and synthesizer, as well as singing. The pantaleon, like any other hammered dulcimer, had no dampers and thus created a wash of sound.

While pianos have all twelve tones of an octave in a row, dulcimers have sections of strings that correspond to different keys. But, unlike on clavichords and harpsichords, dulcimer players can play nuanced dynamics using hammering techniques.

The Piano Has the Same Mechanism as the Dulcimer Although the piano can be classified as a string instrument due to the fact that the sounds come from the vibration of strings, it can also be classified as a percussion instrument because a hammer strikes those strings. In this way it is similar to a dulcimer.

No doubt they were first brought to the colonies from England where they were used in the street music of the time. Portability and simplicity made the dulcimer much more practical than the piano for many settlers. These attributes probably led to its association with the lumber camps of Maine and Michigan.

The dulcimer has been known by many names including Appalachian dulcimer, lap dulcimer, mountain dulcimer, dulcimore, dulcymore, harmony, harmonium, and hog fiddle.

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His life work. It's a sunny afternoon with music ringing through the air at the 36th annual Lone Star dulcimer festival. If you ask any multi-instrumentalist guitar vandal fiddle all that other stuff.

Most players use dulcimers to play relatively simple tunes and to accompany singing. You can play melodies, harmonies, and chords. It is much easier to play chords on the dulcimer than on the guitar! Advanced players can finger-pick complex arrangements including some classical music pieces and Beatles songs.

Indeed, it's often regarded in the musical world as one of the easiest stringed instruments to learn. It's even easier in some cases than the guitar. This makes the dulcimer a great entry for newcomers to stringed instruments.