Forum Activity for @strumelia

Just toilet paper again. 

Some people also call that tune "The Squirrel Hunters" or "Squirrel Hunter".  The tunes might be identical or just very similar, depending on whose version you are listening to. There is a lot of sheet music online for the squirrel version of "Hail...". There might only be small differences to work out between Squirrel.. and Hail.., if you need a start for a dulcimer version..

One small positive thing at my house- have been improving my cooking skills (which were pretty good to begin with).  Last night i stir fried some baby bok choy with some mushrooms and pan-seared raddichio wedges, served it over brown rice with tamari sauce. And it was good. 

Just me and my husband this year for thanksgiving. We're going to have a nice little roast chicken, with cranb sauce, stuffing, baked sweet potatoes, and ice cream for dessert...  at our now festively lit kitchen table. Since it's just two of us, we'll have the same identical meal the next day too with the plentiful leftovers.

Sounds to me like Mr. & Mrs. Claus are two very smart Christmas cookies. 

Belinda, what a tree!  I read in the news just today that Dr. Fauci says Santa is practically immune from Covid, so you must be relieved! 

https://people.com/human-interest/santa-claus-has-innate-immunity-from-covid-19-fauci-reveals/

Here is how my 'cozy lights' over the kitchen table came out- we had our first dinner under a mini canopy of stars! 

Well there's much similarity to the 'cozy' traditions found in colder winter Scandinavian/Northern countries. They know how to really enjoy the comforts that can be had during the dark winter, such as candles, hot cocoa, wooly socks and knit sweaters, warm food and hearty soups, lap throws, saunas, snowshoeing, baking, etc. They are experts in warding off the winter doldrums!

We all have just a few short months of winter to get through before Spring and perhaps an end to this horrible time of virus suffering and social quarantining.

Doesn't it look as though we may have some working vaccines after two or three more months? That is unbelievable and surely something to look forward to!
Just knowing that helps us face the next few dark cold dreary months.
Yes, our holiday season is going to be a bit different this year and maybe it will be hard to stay uplifted. Nowadays it's totally dark at 4pm.

I noticed the other night one of my neighbors... a lady who lives alone, had put up a whole bunch of twinkling colored Xmas lights in her window and on her front porch. It's still a week before Thanksgiving(!), but it struck me as so pretty and cozy. It inspired me to put up a few strands of twinkling lights myself!

I decided i would string some lights over our humble kitchen table nook where my husband and I eat all our meals. I have it in place now, and i can't wait til tonight to see how festive it looks when the sun goes down!  Maybe i'll post a picture here.
I did a little online looking and discovered that apparently there's a whole trend going on right now of people putting up holiday decorations early in order to feel cheerful and comforted despite the ongoing pandemic and the cold weather and short days setting in.
We won't be having a tree this year, and no family coming. But our little kitchen nook will be cheery for sure! 

Lisa, I had a friend years ago who bought a new all cherry hourglass McSpadden. It was wonderful sounding, smooth to play, and SO pretty!  You are going to love yours.

Personally I'm a big fan of the look of instruments that have bodies of all one wood/color. My Galax dulcimer is all cherry and has a nice rich but crisp tone.

One note-  when it arrives you may be surprised that the new cherry wood looks fairly light in color. Just know that it will get darker and richer in color over the months. Take some photos, because in two years it will look different! Both looks are gorgeous . If you want to speed up the darkening process a little, you can leave it exposed to normal room light instead of having it locked up in its dark case. The exposure to light is what slowly darkens it. This happened with my maple instruments as well.

ENJOY your new beauty, we are all excited for you! 

Maybe you mean bending a note, not a slide. But in any case, on a dulcimer you're not going to have action so high off the frets that you can get much of a sharp note by just pressing down harder with a noter on a slide. Most people will sharpen a fretted note by pulling it towards them or pushing it away from them with the fretting hand while fretting it, using the fretting finger or a noter stick. That's a side-to-side stretching of the string to sharpen the note, not a pushing down to the fretboard. I think maybe you are thinking about instruments where the strings are bridged or fretted way high up so that you can push the string down on either side of the bridge to sharpen a note without contacting any fret or fretboard?

It can create a slightly louder volume if an instrument is too quiet.

Pull-offs are easier.

Helps reduce fret buzzes that can happen with very low action. Additionally, you can put on heavy strings without risking buzzes. Eliminates 'mystery' buzzes that appear out of nowhere during the dry winter indoors.

You can strum more aggressively without strings slapping against the finger board, if you like playing vigorously.

Right hand fingerpicking can be easier depending on the fretboard, bridge, and 'strum hollow' design.

Less bumping into the fretboard with either flat picks or finger picks and the resultant thunking noise or pick clack noise.

Reduces pick scratches on the fretboard when you play further away from the bridge to get a mellower tone. True for either flat picks or fingerpicks.

Noter players tend to like higher action... maybe for some combination of the above or maybe they just like the feel. They can get away with higher action if not using bare fingers or making chords.

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All this said, overly high action is both uncomfortable and causes its own problems.

Not sure why you say a slide would be easier with high action...?

As I wrote, tune the open strings to be in tune.

A couple of basic concepts here are:
1) the mere act of tuning = stretching the string to various tensions, causing the note to go higher or lower. If an open string is out of tune, you turn the pegs and tune it to be in tune. Just because a nut notch is higher or lower than the one next to it won't doom an open string to be out of tune by nature.

2) as to fretted strings: if a bridge/nut is very tall and makes the string action too high off the frets, then fretting the string can push down the string enough of a distance to cause a slight bend in the string and pull it a fretted note a little sharp. A 32nd of an inch slot height difference is not likely to do this enough to be able to hear it, especially while playing tunes.

Notches have two jobs: to keep the strings securely spaced from each other from side to side, and to hold the strings at a good height above the frets (action) so that playing will be comfortable for the way you play and so there won't be buzzing if the action is too low. Most folks like as low an action as possible without buzzing (especially beginners with hurting fingers), but there are good reasons why other folks might want slightly higher action. Too high an action causes problems too. Most people agree that dulcimer string notches should be of uniform action height, since there's no reason to purposely make them different heights.

The tiny amount of difference between notches in your photo of notches is probably not going to cause discernable out of tune-ness when playing. If a notch is a tiny bit too low though, it might cause fret buzzing, depending on the action height.

3) Assuming a reasonable action height for all strings, if the frets are in the right places, your fretted notes will sound generally in tune if the open string is in tune. 

Overall, it's common that people wind up buying used dulcimers that have had prior owners file nut and bridge slots to various heights and widths over time. Maybe they put on heavier strings at some point and widened the slots. Two of those U slots in your picture look way too wide for that string shown. Over time or with changing playing preferences, people can change their mind about action height they prefer, or string spacings. It's not uncommon for nuts and bridges to accumulate notch adjustments over time until the best option is to put in a new nut and/or bridge and start fresh, since nuts are cheap and it's usually a simple procedure. A good guitar luthier should have no trouble doing it right, and the job shouldn't cost a fortune.

You tune it so it's not sharp. You tune all your open strings to be in tune.

If it were me I'd get someone else to make a whole new nut. None of those 3 slots looks well made at all, though it's hard to tell anything for sure from the photo. Bad slots make for bad sounding notes, buzzes, and wolf tones.

KenL has it right though- have you determined that you want a pair of melody strings, or 4 equidistant strings? or.. the slots to switch between those two choices later if you want? Decide that first.
Also, remember the bridge will need to at least approximate a similar slot arrangement that echoes the nut.

I love hearing how everyone's doing and what your current interests/projects are.

Terry, a special hug to you- It's so good to see your post. I'm so glad to hear you are slowly recovering, that's sounds like a terrible ordeal.
Simply playing soothing notes for five minutes can be a true balm for our souls. 

John, I bet your son has no idea that his interest in learning classical guitar is lifting up and inspiring YOU as well. 

Dusty, one of the things i love most about Renaissance and medieval era music is how so many of the tunes go back and forth in using a sharp and a natural. It always tickles my senses when the note occurs one way and then the other. I find most often the sharp comes later on, after the natural in the first part.

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.

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!   :)