Forum Activity for @strumelia

Bob, you and your son are totally rockin!     Yayyy...we both met the challenge! 

Sheryl, we did about six takes for this video.  This one was the last take, and the only one where I couldn't resist putting in that final 'last word' click 'cause the silence was deafening... which made us both laugh. 

Tom, the lucky break of Dom actually coming to our town inspired me to try yet again with the bones, and this time it began to 'take'.  I love that we all inspire each other!

OK Bob, now you have to put yor money whar yer mouth is!:

-still rough, but I'm happy to be at this stage after two months of steady practice...lots of room to improve going forward!...

http://fotmd.com/strumelia/youtube/1797/bones-practice-with-fiddle-sept2015

Hey Bob, is this challenge still on?   Are you going to post a recent video of yourself on spoons?

Wout I'd love to see a little quick video demo of you playing the sculptured bones you have...?

Tom, that's cool, a boxwood set.  They must have a very clear tone, it being such a hard dense wood.

I've been practicing.  This evening in fact I played for about an hour along to Brian practicing his fiddle.  At this point I can keep semi-decent rhythm 'most' of the time, though I don't have much of any fancy moves yet.  Because I'm no longer making a horrific random clatter, Brian now doesn't seem to mind my playing along sometimes as he practices.     
I'm pleased with my progress over the past two months, especially so because I had tried and failed on bones several times over the past few years.

I find my left hand is mostly just doing plain time stuff, while my right hand does the triplets and such.  It seems to be veering to that naturally, and I'm letting myself just develop whatever feels good.  I remember the advice about how you could take a dozen beginner bones students and have one teacher teach them all the same way...then if you look at them a year or so later every one of them has their own unique style.

I like my wooden bones most of the time, they are easier to handle...but I have some ox shin "Lark" thin bones that have that porcelain-like bone tone that Im trying to work with too.  They seem to require a whole different hand position and technique, so that presents additional learning curve I'll have to work through. 

For the wooden ones-  my favorite right hand pair is a maple Whamdiddle brand pair in the 'short/narrow' size.  Then in the right hand my fave pair so far is some Whamdiddle poplar in regular size.  I suspect if we practice a lot we can probably make most bones sound pretty good no matter what the wood is or whether we split pairs up. 

Is that the dulcimer in your avatar picture Robert?

Big hugs to you Dana!   Great news!!

Jeff thank you for the great report.  So glad you made some enjoyable connections and friends, and that your Dad had a good time too...that's just awesome. 

That's truly a wonderful tale, Ann!   :)

Tom's a member over there too, Sheryl!   YOU could join there just because you like to listen, too, you know.   ;)

I see, Sheryl- good sleuthing, my friend!

If you go on this site:  http://minstrelbanjo.ning.com/    you can play just about any of the videos there and have some good minstrel banjo tunes to play bones along with on your computer, along with a LOT more by Tim Twiss.   :)

Worth repeating, several times.   

David,

if playing DAd tab and in DAd tuning, you will be playing in the key of D.  You can lower all your strings by one step and be in CGC tuning, and you can still play using the same DAd tab, but you'll be playing in the key of C.

Sheryl I have most of Tim Twiss's recordings, including his Grape Vine Twist cd- good stuff to practice with!  Brian and I are actually playing Grape Vine Twist on fiddle/banjo lately.  I have almost every minstrel era recording I can get hold of.  I'm curious as to how you came to get Tim's cd- do you play minstrel banjo?

Tom- what are your fave minstrel banjo cds to practice bones with?   I like the Joe Ayers, Bob Flesher, and the Camptown Shakers stuff particularly.

Cool- so Wout you are practicing to old English or Irish tunes?

Sheryl to an old country song?

When I'm practicing alone, I'm playing to Civil War era minstrel tunes and songs on cds.  Here's an example of stuff i play to: https://youtu.be/VI-Ukj7c78E?list=PLSMm3dUxYUnV5epZOGii-FCbDrPdVQsFU

Or I practice just with no music, practicing very basic rhythms over and over. When I play to Brian's live fiddling, he's doing American oldtime tunes at various speeds.

Then you'd need to make an actual photo album so one can see all the images side by side... either here in your profile page Photo section, or online somewhere in a photo hosting site.

So...what music are we practicing to?  

Why?...Because the file attachment editor feature is not intended to function like a 'photo story album', Wout.      Most folks would either just attach ONE file or image file, or if there were many, they'd just load the pictures onto a free photo site somewhere online and then post a single link to them in their post so peopel could go look at them in an album or webpage online, rather than attaching 15 or more separate pdfs in one post after another. OR, they'd create a new photo album in their profile page Photos area.  The post attachment function is not meant to present a long photo album series of pictures named the way you want.   That's why. 

My new bones are coming any time now, they were in stock.  Good thing is that the site tells you right there whether a particular style is in stock or not.  A lot of specific bones are hard to get, being made by hand by certain people only.  Some styles are only available once in a while, too.

I talked to Scott last week and mentioned what you said about the American vs. European grip, and Scott said for the people he knows, it mostly just comes down to personal experimentation and choice.  I have to say that of the American players i see all kinds of different hand/bones positions- lots of variety!      We all have different size and shaped hands, so we all need different size/weight/balance bones, too I imagine!  Brian's walnut ones he made for himself are way too big and clunky for my hands, I know that.  They seem to fit him just right.

Oh, I really should mention this- here is the biggest/best website dedicated to bones, run by Scott Miller... BonedryMusic.com

Scott is awesome, and very giving of his time and knowledge. He offers the absolute biggest selection and learning material on bones .. anywhere .

Here's a video of Scott's energetic and joyful bones playing style at a Civil War re-enactment 8yrs ago (too bad it's fuzzy and has wind noise): 

Wout-  maybe bones made from bamboo should be called "boos"   heh heh

Sheryl, I'm a beekeeper.   Send me a private message with your postal address and i'll mail you a little piece of pure beeswax.

I'm fielding multiple complaints from members who feel that some folks are denigrating other styles and types of players in their comments.  I have to agree, such comments and remarks are unnecessarily derogatory and thus inappropriate.

I'd like to ask everyone here to please stick with the subject of the original post here, which is simply "What tunings I like to use, and why".  The subject is not "What I don't like about other people's playing styles and dulcimers".

This goes for elsewhere on the site as well.  To all: please resist continually remarking on things you disapprove of.

Wout, that's an interesting approach!   I certainly do notice that if one clenches too much it produces less of the nice triplets etc...but what you say is true as well, I just never thought of it that way too.

hahaha.

I sold three pairs of bones that I didn't care for much, and ordered two pairs that I really want to try out (made of ox shin bones but slender sized).   Wound up being about the same money, so that's always nice.   can't wait to get the new ones.

I practiced with Brian this evening...with him playing fiddle tunes.  I get nervous about that because he's pretty particular about accompaniment sound/noise, and it's so easy to sound too loud on bones.     Well, I made tons of mistakes, flubbing up left and right, but got a few good phrases in too.  So....he totally shocked me by saying that he LIKED our fiddle/bones "duet".   !!!  I asked him if he was just trying to be nice, and he said no, that he liked it and wanted to do more practice of fiddle & bones together, so I could improve more.    Woo-HOOO!

Despite all the awkward attempts and missed beats, I love that feeling of when you occasionally 'nail it' with a good crisp rattle that is perfectly timed and snapped shut at the end just right. 

Don perhaps you mean Homer Ledford, not Roscoe Holcomb?

Jean Ritchie once wrote that when she was young she and her sisters had a bit of a hard time singing so high in C, but that they had little choice because the men of the family and in church sang everything in C since that's how it was in the hymn books and the men had no trouble singing low in that key.  So the women had to go along with it but an octave higher, and their voices became trained to sing higher than they might normally have done if they had been able to choose the keys early on.
Jean's father was quite shy about playing the dulcimer in front of others, and he played exclusively in key of C, ionian mode.  Many of the tunes he played were hymns and church songs, though he played some fun tunes as well.  But Jean said if people focused on him too much while he played, that he would often just get up and put the dulcimer back on the wall.

Jean also wrote that shortly before her time, Cecil Sharpe came through the area on one of his later music collecting trips, and that he asked the children in school about the kinds of music and instruments they all had and played or sang at home.  Jean's sister Edna remembered this happening, and when she was questioned, she did not even mention the dulicmer in their home or the playing of it, because as she told Jean, she did not get the impression that the dulcimer was considered a 'real' or serious instrument like the kind she thought Mr. Sharp might even be interested in for his survey.  This reminds me of the passage written by Dame Campbell about how Sharp would occasionally follow leads through the mountains to locate a pocket of good singers he was told about, but that sometimes he'd arrive there after several days travel only to find the singers in question were black, and he'd turn around and go back, considering the lead and his trip to have been a total waste of time.  Thus, many songs by black mountain dwellers of the same time and place were never recorded on paper or cylinders.  Information on such songs and music would have been a true treasure to have now.

The dulcimer's ancestors were often used to play hymns and religious pieces, particularly as the violin was frowned upon as being associated with unGodliness and was more often used for dances and 'frolicking' because of that. 

Sheryl, you'll have a hard time using a hard dry cake of violin rosin.  Gorilla snot is rosin in a soft paste base, and rubs off easily when you're done.  I can't imagine the hard cake rosin would work well- it tends to be very brittle and crumbles, cracks, and powders off the cake if rubbed on something hard like the bones.

By the way, you are only supposed to applly a little sticky beeswax or GSnot to the EDGES of the bones- not on the big flat surfaces.

Hey that's a cool story, thanks!

On our new site, to add a video, you don't use the youtube "Embed code"or "Share This" code to add videos.

When you click the "+" to add a video, (Youtube in this example) --it asks you for the video's "ID or URL"   ....it means exactly that.

So for your YT vid in your post, you can either paste in your video's URL from your browser:  (looks like:https:// www.youtube. com/watch?v= G_BSxXwUCLc)..(i added some spaces to break up the link here)

OR......

the video's Youtube ID , meaning simply:   G_BSxXwUCLc

I believe it works the same way for Vimeo videos.

You can just buy a little beeswax candle- either a taper or a votive.  But make sure you buy it from a real beekeeper, cause lots of commercial 'beeswax candles' are only part beeswax, with lots of parrafin mixed in to be cheaper.  And parrafin doesn't have that 'sticking factor' that real beeswax has, that you are seeking for this purpose.

Sheryl....yay!

I read that if you rub a piece of beeswax up and down on the EDGES of the bones only, it keeps them from sliding out or down.  I tried it and it works well.  doesnt take much, but may need doing periodically.

Only if the deadline is Sept 14th, and video doesn't have to be more than 1 min long.  And can be full of screwups.  

AND, that we can just embed the vids in this thread instead of throwing them the main video section.   lolol...  how does all that sound?

Bob I'm now suspecting that you are a secret virtuoso spoons player, unbeknownst to everyone here. 

Once I can get through just maybe a minute or two of rattling without totally screwing it up and falling on my face, i will try to make a little sample, Bob!  If only to help encourage others to be accepting of their beginner skills.      But of course as we know, I could do just great for a few minutes, then turn on the camera and suddenly I can't do a single thing!   -always a frustration...   ;D

Ken, just copy and paste the ENTIRE url from your browser window (not from the Youtube 'share' or 'embed'' codes).

For example, one of mine would look like this:

https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=okPnwFWvErE

 (without the space after https: )

-that's the "URL" they are looking for.  The clue here is the error message: "unable to extract youtube id from url"...so it's telling you the URL is not correct.  You are trying to paste in a youtube share code, not an URL.  It wants the URL (web address of the video)

OR, to directly give it the "youtube id"..... i think you could also paste in the actual YT vid ID#,
which in the above case would be: okPnwFWvErE

Tom, I see you over on MinstrelBanjo site.   

That's a lot to learn all at once!

Marg, I should clarify this...  I don't have all strings just tuned an octave higher- they'd break!   What I do is- I've removed my heavier Bass and Middle strings and exchanged them for what you might think of as all thin melody strings.  Those strings are then tuned in generally the same octave as my melody string.  In effect there is no more low octave bass string. 
So, if I wanted to play in the key of D in ionian... YOU would tune DAA, and I would tune dAA.  Then when I fretted the tonic note on my melody string it would sound like dAd...with the middle string A being the lowest note of those three sounding notes.   OR, I might tune it ddA, so that when I fret the third fret tonic note, the 3 strings would be playing ddd.  I explain a bit more about this here: http://dulcimer-noter-drone.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-i-dont-use-bass-and-middle-strings.html

It's all a matter of personal preference of course.   Wonderful that we can all get so many different results and effects! 

This keeps coming up every year or so.  Ken's article is great, but his numeric naming of the octaves is incorrect, by today's generally accepted standards of where 'middle C' is.  People keep pointing this out, and it really should be corrected.

If tuned DAd, the mountain dulcimer is tuned (low to high):  D3, A3, d4   The high melody string D4 is the note right above Middle C on the piano.  The Bass string D is the D note BELOW Middle C.

Here are some more online tuning aids:

http://dulcimer-noter-drone.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-notes-do-i-tune-my-strings-to.html

I'm excited for you Sheryl!   Did you get one pair or two?

I found it almost impossible to practice to varying music and tempos at first, but I seem to be a bit more able to at least try varying tempos now.  I agree, it's great advice to just practice with all kinds of music, whether you're good at it or not doesn't matter...I'm sure it really helps build our skills.   :)

I have a beautiful repro minstrel banjo made by the same builder, James Hartel, that made the one Rhiannon is showing there.  Mine is a different model type though.  Rhiannon has such a graceful way about her hands when she plays banjo and other instruments...it's a real individual thing. 
Sheryl- I had to chuckle when you wrote repo banjo (as in repossessed) instead of repro (as in reproduction)  ;)  Jim Hartel told me he custom made her banjo for her, so we'll assume it was not repossessed.  Mine however might have been, I can't be sure!