I can hear the crickets,frogs and cicadas singing in the background...

I love the soft  sound of the dulcimer and the great playing. Very  Good!

Shades of Less Paul. Great!

This is reallly cool!  I love the gourd dulcimer concept!  Sounds great!

Awesome tone, great playing.

That pokeweed flute sounds great! Using pokeweed...now that's taking your music to the deep end!

Steven

I've experimented with making gourd ocarinas (which use the gourd chamber as Helmholtz resonator, and while I've gotten a few to work, I've yet to achieve something I'm happy with; you need a pretty small gourd lest the fundamental frequency becomes very  low, but the smaller gourds leave you less leeway for working them (you also have to open them, clean them out, and reassemble).  

I'm quite interested in using the stalks of giant sunflowers, but have not successfully grown specimens that work.  I did make a couple of flutes out of pokeweed stalk (pokeweed is toxic -- I don't recommend working with it).  Here's a video of the pokeweed flute, along with some dulcimer and some desert scenery.

Yes, those resonator dulcimers are on the high end of the dulcimer price scale, that's for sure. 

Very nice sound.

Those flutes sound really good! Have you ever tried using an entire gourd for a sound chamber on a flute? There have been some pretty strange objects used to make flutes...for example, the Incas made a flute (kena) from a human thigh bone (after the Spanish conquest, they made a stringed instrument (charango) from an armadillo shell).

Thanks for the information about gourd dulcimers and playing slide (I've seen those resonator dulcimers at Folkcraft...they're very nice, but a bit too expensive for me). Something to think about.

Steven

Gourd instruments are definitely fun.  I reckon you'll have to make your own (also fun if you're prepared to sacrifice a few gourds along the way figuring it out) or commission one.  I've only ever seen one out in the wild, years ago, at an antique market in Asheville, NC.  It stuck in my mind and I finally got around to building my version of it about 3 years ago -- the one in this video.   Lots of folks out their making gourd banjos -- but dulcimers are definitely more rare.

The slide instrument from the Woodshed video is actually a separate instrument with high action and a magnetic pickup (and a bigger gourd), set up more like a dulcimer version of a lap steel -- you can find out a bit more about that one here .    This was the first instrument I ever built.

For slide and fretting on the same instrument, I believe Folkcraft sells a resonator dulcimer with a feature that lets you switch back and forth between two actions so you can do either slide or normal fretting on the same instrument -- which could be nice as any instrument that's friendly for normal fretting tends to have the strings too close to fretboard to facilitate slide playing unless you've got a really deft touch.

But gourds are nature's resonator and each one has a unique vibe, literally.  Lately I've been experimenting with making gourd flutes:  

Voyager I

Legend

sound & playing, very impressive

Michael, Loved it! Middle eastern with a bit of swamp mixed in!

Thanks for the explanation of your set-up on the gourd dulcimer, Michael. By the way, it sounds awesome played with a slide...now I want one! 

Steven

Thanks Steven.  Interesting that it grabs you as Indian in flavor; a few other folks have mentioned it struck them as Middle-Eastern.  

As to the sound of the gourd, the sound here is just the gourd through a microphone with some reverb added (a bit too much in retrospect), so this is pretty much what it sounds like.  It doesn't have a pick-up on it, so it's always through the mic when I record it.   You can hear some more variations on it in some of my other postings... two good examples: 

Woodshed

I Navigate By Uncertain Stars

That gourd dulcimer sounds great! How does it sound acoustically? I really like your music, too...to me it sounds like the country blues...the country being India.

Steven