Forum Activity for @strumelia

Hi everyone!  It's been a crazy year. Between the holiday season coming up shortly, and the many ways folks are moving to online or virtual events and promotions, I thought it would be a perfect time to remind you of the several ways you can promote your offerings, events, and items for sale on FOTMD!... see the attached image numbering ways 1-3 that I describe below.

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Please look over the following four ways to promote sales and events, then decide which way fits what you want to offer our members. In some cases you may want to utilize two ways:

1. The most highly visible and most versatile way to promote what you offer is through buying a main page Banner Ad in our sponsor slideshow carousel! The possibilities are endless since the only requirement is that whatever you are offering is music-related. Our rates are as low as $10/month so this is very affordable, see the rates and details HERE . Your ad purchase helps us pay our costs to keep FOTMD up and running. Your profile page will get a Sponsor designation on it. In your banner, you can sell instruments, CDs, books and courses, workshops, promote your band or upcoming virtual events or concerts, advertise lessons and your websites. Your banner ad will be hotlinked to take folks to your chosen website for more information. Promote a new zoom gathering or online jam you've started, or maybe you just want to sell off a few spare dulcimers to thin your herd- why not buy a two month banner ad!

2. List your Event in our site's Festivals and Gatherings Calendar . See your event listed in the Events calendar on our main page as well. It's free! the only requirement is that your event must have more than one teacher or presenter/performer, OR that your event is free to all at no charge. The Events calendar allows you to create a FOTMD page with a comment wall and have members list themselves as 'attending'... it also shows on our main page in the Coming Events widget ("2" in below image). To add an event to our Festivals calendar listings, go to your own profile page and click your "Events" tab there, then click the Plus+ button to add your event. It will then show up in the Fotmd Events listings. Do you have an upcoming zoom/virtual event coming up and you want to boost attendance?- well then list it in our FOTMD Events calendar for free, AND purchase a low priced main page Banner Ad where it will be seen by all!

3. Are you offering your own workshop, or giving a virtual or live concert? For single instructor or single performer events, use our Single Instructor Events Forum , HERE . Our Single Instructor Events Forum is the place to list your Club meetings and regular jam events as well. It too is free! Consider additionally purchasing a (1) Banner Ad in our main page slideshow ahead of time if you really want to super boost visibility of your personal workshops or concert! (Remember you can sell or promote anything in our Banner Ad slideshow as long as it's music-related.)

4. Do you have an item to sell that's music related, but is not an event? Are you selling a musical instrument or two you no longer need, or a stack of tab books or a CD? Are you looking for a used dulcimer? Then use our ForSale/Wanted Forum, HERE . Our For Sale forum is also free to use- though we do ask that you donate a minimum $5 to FOTMD "if" you make a sale from your ad that's over $100. There are some limitations in how you can list items there, so please read our site FAQ/Guidelines before placing a free ad there. It's not intended for commercial sellers or services. If you have multiple or valuable items for sale, consider purchasing a main page Banner Ad at our very low rates instead.

Thanks!

Funny little story concerning the trash can icon button-

As Admin, I naturally have many more buttons available to me than the average member here. a couple years ago I went to delete a discussion from the Forums and I wasn't paying attention. I clicked the trash can icon and POOF! the entire forum for the whole site was gone. Ten years' worth of discussions, by thousands of members.   I thought I'd about die!
Luckily, there was a site backup that was only an hour old, and I was able to restore things to that point in time.
Immediately after all was well again, I adjusted the site code so that the trash can icon that would delete the entire Forum was not even visible to me anymore. Step awaaaaaay from the trash can! LOLOL 

Sending positive karma your way, Ken Longfield!

Jill, the only icon you might want to hesitate about clicking on is the trash can one. Trash cans will delete something!  Aside from that, it's great to learn by clicking on buttons and icons to find out what they do here on fotmd. Usually you can just hit 'back' or 'cancel' if you get to somewhere you don't want to be after clicking somewhere.   

Thanks Dusty.

Jill, here's an existing thread addressing the same question:

https://fotmd.com/forums/forum/site-questions-how-do-i/33226/how-do-i-ditch-this-chat-pop-up

I've cleaned up my modest vegetable garden for the winter (it's fenced in, about 20'x40', with three long 3 foot wide beds). Most of the plants had died already from exhaustion or from our first several mild frosts.
But a little section of young lettuces and a few dozen radish plants still survived and were growing.
I know from the forecast that some hard freezes in the 20s are coming this next week, so today I'll go out and cut a couple last bags' worth of leaf lettuce and pull a few last radishes. That'll last us for another couple of weeks eating.
At that point I'll switch to buying lettuce and doing my usual kitchen growing of alfalfa sprouts in jars. We love having a supply of fresh sprouts during the winter, and it's not so hard to keep up doing.

I do enjoy taking a total vacation from garden chores each winter!

I so  enjoyed this article and video of an elderly Italian man serenading his hospitalized wife outside her window, with her favorite songs played on accordion...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/11/europe/italian-hospital-serenade-scli-intl/index.html

Tim Grothen. Jim is helping out during the transition.

It's a miracle you even were able to tune your middle string up to a high A4 without it breaking. What gauge string is it??  I'm wondering if you are sure about what octave it's currently tuned to... maybe it is currently in A3. That's a real easy mistake to make.

Yes the middle string is usually a lower tone than the melody strings, --or the same tone, as in DAA tuning. 

Sorry, i corrected my typo.  The bass is D3, the middle A is A3, and the high melody d is D4.

Thus, a dulcimer tuning of DAA is (D3 A3 A3) on the piano. The common tuning DAd is (D3 A3 D4) on the piano. To play lonesome Aeolian mode tunes you might try tuning to DAc (D3 A3 C4).

Here's a decent chart.

I believe the capital D that is commonly used to indicate the bass string is D3, the D below middle C on a piano.  The lower case d that is commonly used to indicate the higher octave d of the melody string(s) is D4... the next higher note after middle C. (middle C is most often counted as C4)

Yes when writing DAd or DAdd tuning of dulcimers, the first upper case D is the low bass string (D3) and the last lower case d or dd are the higher octave D4 on a piano. The middle string A is upper case because it's still a note in the "3" octave: below middle C.

Just a reminder that our Main page FOTMD banner ads in our rotating sponsor slideshow are available for as little as $10/month!

Do you want to promote your new book or CD, music-related merchandise or instruments you build, your new online Zoom event, your online classes and workshops, a collection of instruments you are wanting to sell, or other events?  NOW is the moment to purchase a low priced highly visible banner ad!  Plus, your ad is also a hotlink which when clicked on, takes people directly to your webpage. Your purchase helps support FOTMD.

Don't miss out on customers for the holidays- purchase a banner ad slot now!

Click here for rates and details .

Lisa C, just a suggestion so that we can all discuss these details without getting mixed up: it helps to list both the string letter notes and the gauges in the same order. It's been mostly accepted to list from low to high with dulcimers... thus you'd write DAd or CGG and the first letter of each of those is assumed to be the low/bass string. But to carry this through consistently, you'd then list string gauges in the same order (low bass string, middle string, melody string). So for example you would write:  .022, .012, .010 for DAd... not in the opposite order that you wrote.  :)

Personally, I would not bother to change string gauges if going back and forth between DAd and CGC. I do understand though that you are talking about 'ideal' gauges here.. so maybe you intend to stay in a tuning and wanting the best gauges just for that tuning. Definitely there are various reasons when one might want to do that!

Lisa C, if you are planning a 1-3-5 tuning in the key of D, then keep in mind the middle string will be an F# (not an F). Also, that middle string will be the F# that's LOWER than your melody string but higher than your bass string. If you try to tune the middle string to the F# that's in the same higher octave as the melody string, (in other words 2.5 steps higher than the high d if you are starting from DAd) then at that VSL you'll likely break the middle string if tuning it to F#4 (4 being the fourth octave on the piano). In a nutshell- use the middle string F# that's lower than the melody string for 1-3-5.

Notes such as E and F or F# are a bit tricky on the dulcimer. They can ride the fence of being in either higher or lower octave which can be confusing. With those 'cusp' notes we should double check that we're not only using the right gauge string, but also that we're not aiming for the wrong octave when we go to tune that string, since it's not always obvious.

Yes it's a cool and fascinating thing!  Glad you brought this up David.
I contacted Seth years ago about his story and the illustrations. He's a very nice fellow.

that is super cool Robin!

Tim is a truly amazing musician no matter what instrument or approach he takes!

Dusty it makes me very happy to hear this wonderful news about your wife's new job.  Yaaaaaaay!! 

What a pretty cherry Ginger Susie!  And the pair together are so complimentary.

Sounds like you did some good research beforehand as to what your preferences and needs are. Good for you!

Enjoy your sweet new bright singing bird. 

Traildad, Fotmd is a social network, which has more various areas of content than a typical php forum, while it's also more searchable with less marketing than most Facebook pages.

Our Forums section is for most general interest discussions, and you can search within the categories there. But say you are particularly into noter playing, or chromatic dulcimer playing, or building, or dulcimer history-  there may be a special interest focus Group for that interest area, where people with a particular passion can hold discussions specifically related to that interest.  Having Groups is a way of keeping in one place discussions and info related to that certain focus area. Think of a Group as a club rather than a forum. In this respect Groups are useful. Imagine a new member looking for help in TablEdit or microphones... they can find that help very quickly in our Technology Group rather than searching all over the site.
But the general Forums area is useful because the subjects are more likely to be of interest to the whole membership ... such as changing strings or identifying a mystery dulcimer or finding tab books. Or, just gabbing about something nice that happened to you yesterday, or what new tune you are working on. 

I hope that helps clarify a little more the difference between Groups (and their discussions) and the site's "Forums" area. FOTMD includes more than discussions and forums. Members have their own profile page with photo galleries, their videos and audio recordings, and events. Additionally, members can browse and search ALL the site's videos in one place, also all the site's photos and audios. Thus, you can go to a member's page to see that member's content and activity, but you can also go see ALL the photos, audios, or videos on the site in one central place by clicking on the top bar links.

When new members join, they are frequently disoriented by the many site areas and functions... and I understand that they might feel frustrated. I wouldn't want to write tutorials on every area and function here- it would simply take me way too long and few would want to slog through it. People tend to be impatient. But if they stick around and click around, they'll get a sense for how things are organized. Time makes things clearer.
I'll be the first to say FOTMD is not perfect by any means. More than anything else, it's meant to simply be an encouraging and safe place for beginner players to get help and make dulcimer friends. 

My curiosity compels me to ask- what forums were you participating in forty years ago?  I'm dying to know! 

Note that the My Posts tab is on the Forums page. Thus, as you correctly guessed, it shows you which Forum discussions you have posted in.

The "Help me learn this song" group is a Group. Groups have their own discussions which are completely separate from our site discussion Forums.  There is no tab that specifically shows you what Group discussions you've been active on, however if you go to a Group that you are a member of, you can see the Group's list of discussions. When you see the 'subscribe' button next to a discussion that is Yellow, you have either posted in that discussion OR you clicked to subscribe to that group discussion. Note that if you post in a Group discussion, you will be automatically subscribed/following it (the button will be yellow to indicate this). You can always click the yellow button to turn OFF your following of that discussion if you no longer want to receive notifications of a new post in that discussion.

Additionally, on your Profile page, there are sections for "All Activity" (all your recent activity, including things you 'liked'), "Latest Group Discussions" (that you have participated in), and "Latest Forum Discussions" (that you have participated in).
The activity sections on your profile page show your activity as opposed to the general site activity of all members seen on the site's Main page.

Hope this helps.

Yes.

For the past six months of being covid era homebodies, we've not eaten out at all, and in fact only even gotten takeout food once, early on. One because we are super cautious, and Two because the restaurants around here are not all that inspiring to us to spend the money. We've been used to cooking at home.

However, today i drove to buy some hardware supplies and as i drove home past Main St I noticed a local Italian place had moved from its dreary old mall location to a new place right on MainSt.  It looked pretty and inviting as I drove by ...and i smelled pizza. (!) So when i got home i looked up online and saw a whole new website had been put up for it, featuring lots of online ordering options and local delivery too.

I decided to splurge and order us some custom pizzas. Brian was really surprised but i was hungry and had a serious hankering for pizza!  I ordered us each a whole pizza with our own favorite toppings, so that we could have it for dinner two nights in a row.  I paid online with a credit card, even the tip. The pizzas arrived quickly and I had her leave them on the porch table.
It was acceptably good pizza and we very much enjoyed the rare luxury of fresh delivery from only a few blocks away. My pizza craving will now be satisfied for a good long while. 

Fascinating dulcimer!  Obviously some care was put into designing it.

I suspect the lower sound holes were originally "f" style sound holes like on violins and cellos. Perhaps the lower parts of the cutout warped out or split off and someone just cut those ears off and neatened up the holes to match. I see that sometimes with sound holes that have curvy cutouts against the grain. 

You can see an example of this here:

Assuming the dulcimer's "zero fret" was positioned in the correct place, I have to ask- did you cut slots deep enough so that the strings rest on the zero fret?  Because if the strings are now higher so that they no longer touch the zero fret, then the intonation might be off on all the frets because you'll have changed the scale but not the fret layout. Sorry, I just had to ask because you can't tell from the photos.

Looks like a decent dulcimer, and the price was certainly right!

Being able to pick out a tune on your instrument is an ability that many folks wish they could develop.  Just saying!   :)

Ken, that's very funny and also clever..   (bff= best friend forever)

But.. wouldn't they have to be F#'s to equal the same number of steps up from the tonic as in DAA? (correct me if i'm wrong).

Traildad, that walnut and spruce with the slightly larger size will sound very mellow and lovely, I suspect.  :D 

I know, right? 

No, I'm not the guy with the kilt...lol! If you look beyond him, closer to the band. I have a black top, short grey hair, and a black skirt with pink spots on it.

Here's an example of a really bog high energy contra dance- at the Saratoga NY Dance Flurry... I've gone to this dance a few times and danced to this band... they are cool. (btw I am not in this video) It's just the two guys playing instruments, but they keep adding snippets of themselves recording them live right there and looping them on top of each other til it sounds really intense.  Watch them work, but then be amazed when at around 1:45 in the video, the camera starts panning out to the dancers in the hall...   That's a major dance.

Just sitting here this evening fondly watching dances and spotting folks I remember in them...  :)

Then lastly, here's one more video of the same venue in Saratoga, from this past February... just before Covid-19 came along and RUINED everything. This one has a more traditional fiddle band playing, but you get the idea of how much fun and high energy it can be... 

Because of Covid-19, the last contra dance i attended was Feb 22 2020. Of course all contra dances have been called off until things are safe again, whenever that will be.  I sure miss contra dancing a whole lot. I used to go 3 or 4 times a month to various dances in different locations within an hour's drive. 

I just came across a youtube video I didn't see before, of a dance in Sheffield MA back in November 2019, it's one of the dances I used to attend regularly. It's held in a lovely old wooden community center, Dewey Hall. This particular dance tends to have quite a few dancers in their teens. It's a small hall, so we have to be a little careful not to bump into others. Most contra dances are from 8-11pm, with a 20 minute snack break in the middle.

I remember this dance, it was not as high energy compared to some other dances I go to. But it's a great mix of young and old and everyone in between. The boy fiddler Zane in the middle is only around 10 years old, and his father is playing guitar. The caller is a very talented musical young lady in her 20s named Maggie. I know many of the dancers by name. All wonderful folks, and I really look forward to the day the dances start up again... everyone will be soooo happy when the in-person dancing resumes!

You can see me here and there in the video on the right side, mostly at 0:47 and again around 1:58.  I have a black top on.

I'm rootin' for you Sandi! 

Today I'll cleanup another area of the veg garden that is kaput for the year- the cucumbers. The tomato plants are mostly brown now, with a few odd stragglers still putting out some plum or cherry tomatoes. But I'll still be planting lettuce and radish seed every couple of weeks 'til mid Oct- they like the cold weather and will usually thrive until early December here in New York. My pepper plants are doing fine too- they seemed pretty frost resistant last year until Thanksgiving or so. I've found it helps to do the Fall veggie garden cleanup a section at a time... easier on me than trying to do it all in a couple of days later on.

I've actually been keeping up with my trampoline/rebounder sessions. It's been over two months now, and I've managed to go from starting out at 5 minute sessions to now 11 minutes, soon to be 12.  I think my current goal is to be able to do a 15 minute session at least 5 days a week. That doesn't sound like a lot, but try doing jumping jacks or jumping rope for 15 minutes straight and you'll quickly see what i mean.   It's hard work! 
I alternate straight bouncing with jumping jacks and jogging on it. When my 11 min are up, I get off and do some stretches and twists to finish up. So far I'm not avoiding it or feeling bored to death. I like that I don't have to spend a lot of time to feel like I've had a workout. I know it's doing me a lot of good... my legs are definitely stronger. I notice I'm going upstairs much more easily, and it seems easier to tie my shoes and do weeding or vacuuming.
I've lost about 4 pounds in the past two months, but I hesitate to attribute it to anything in particular. But far better than slowly continuing to gain, like i was before.

Poppop, that is very cool!  Thanks for joining us here. 

Dusty, I'd say the bride and groom put a lot of thought and consideration into their adapted wedding.  They did a great job and at least for me it would have been more fun than a mansion Las Vegas wedding.  Bingo and paint ballon art and individual food bags!     It does indeed sound memorable.  :D

For what it's worth, Gregg I think you look great with the super short beard!  My husband did the same thing, for the same reason. 

That's right, it's more about the doing of it, not the recording of it.
You did good playing for your friend, Irene. 

Here Traildad: http://www.strothers.com/string_choice.html

(Make sure you are calculating in the right octave.)

Ken's point is  I think: "one size down.. from what?"- because there are all kinds of different gauge sets for dulcimers that people use, and it also depends on the tunings you want to use.

All that said, a .022 for the wound bass and a .014 for the middle string would likely work fine too. But I'd hesitate to put .012 on the melody string and tune it up to high D on a 29" VSL... it would probably be ok, but it'd be pretty tight and therefore not as comfy to play.  .010s would be perfect for melody strings on a 29"er.  :)