Forum Activity for @strumelia

It's not easy to give quick answers to such questions. Some good info has already been posted to your question, but really I'd suggest doing some reading of books and articles written by both Ralph Lee Smith (such as "Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions") and Jean Ritchie ("Singing Family of the Cumberlands").  Those two books in particular are enjoyable reading and filled with descriptions of how mtn dulcimers were played and built before the 1960s 'revival'. Reading books and articles on mtn dulcimer history, and on early American folk music history in general are a wonderfully enriching way to learn all that is currently known, without trying to limit it to a few sentences. I remember almost 25 years ago, curling up in a big chair to read Jean's story of her childhood and her musical Kentucky mountain family, loving how every page swept me into another place and time.

In the Positive Thread... I'm just wondering what some of you are doing for the holiday season!  Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukka, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, or you just 'do cozy things'...  tell me what plans you have to make winter meaningful or enjoyable.
Are you looking forward to a family gathering or cooking a special meal?  Do you have a musical event planned or going to a cool concert?  Are you getting a new instrument to play?  Adopting a pet?  Reaching out to an estranged relative?  Traveling to a place far away?  Knitting some festive socks or making some other homemade gift?  Working a double shift so others can enjoy the holiday?  Having the neighbors over?  Honoring the memory of a loved one?  Setting up bird feeders for wildlife to enjoy?
Tell us how you add something positive to your December/January. ☃️ 🕯

@Lisa-Golladay 's post covered the practical pros & cons quite well.

It's always a great time to get interested in banjos. (or dulcimers!)

Speaking further about sound box sizes-  I also have an all-curly-maple hummel (mtn dulcimer like in many ways) which has a very large and deep sound box/body... and even though it's all maple it has a big resonant mellow tone. My maple mtn dulcimer has a very shallow depth body, and thus its voice is crisp and clear, less 'mellow'. They are both all maple but very different body dimensions and so have different tones.

"Good" sound can mean something different depending on personal taste.  Both my all-maple instruments sound wonderful, but they sound very different from each other!

My Keith Young curly maple dulcimer is all maple, even the fingerboard, and it sounds great and is in perfect condition after 26 years. I used it for this site's logo . Maple has a nice crisp sound, as opposed to slightly 'mellower' tone of walnut or spruce for example. It's also pretty hard, so (I'm guessing) would be a little less likely to get dinged. That said, I feel the volume and dimensions of the sound box tends to be a bigger factor in the tone of the sound than the type of wood does.

Reminder:  Members are allowed to have no more than two threads at any given time in our For Sale forum. Please contact me or another moderator for help in removing threads you no longer want active. Thanks!

Hey, i resemble that remark, Dusty!  

Well that's gonna be fun!  🎼

Yes, Teddy is the grey boy, on the right.  :)

If you are going with nylon strings, I really would recommend Nylgut brand, their set for "classic" banjo. Dulcimers and banjos have similar scale lengths and sometimes tune to the same octaves and notes. I've used both steel and various gut and nylon strings on all my banjos for about 25 years. I've found that on banjos, other brands and types of nylon strings feel overly bouncy, take a long time to 'settle', and tend to break too often. The worst in my experience were fishing line, and the Aquila nylons. The Nylgut strings have a nice tension, settle within hours, and very seldom break for me. They were a game changer.

Good luck on your fiddling adventure... (you already know we are Fans of Nate and all his endeavors!)

Being married to a wonderful fiddler, I know what a challenge it is to learn to fiddle and not sound like a dying cat. I second what Dusty said but would refine it say it likely takes more like three years to not sound horrible. HOWEVER!- you being NATE you might well take to fiddling like a duck to water.

Keep us posted and don't be afraid to post some early clips of your progress.  We can take it, scritchy-scratchies and all! 

I always used to find that a mtn dulcimer gets drowned out in a recording of several musicians on different instruments, if the person who is recording does not take special steps with the microphone placements to ensure otherwise. If you have a fiddle, banjo, mando, and dulcimer and mic all of them equally or just have a mic placed in the middle of the group of musicians, the dulcimer sound will be almost lost among them. When playing in real life, it's a little easier to hear the dulcimer among the live group. That's just from my own experience though.

The old forum discussions on either of the two ED sites are not archived or accessible, i believe. If I'm wrong, someone please point us to exactly where/how they are located. The only things archived from the original ED site were Tabs, Events, Articles, and club listings I think. Not forum discussions. I'm not even sure where the ED Articles are archived anymore. Many of them were also published in Mel Bay's dulcimersessions  .com website, which no longer exists either.  

It's that time of year when the flowers and veggies are all getting overgrown and ragged looking. Time to start pulling things out, pruning, tidying up a little area here and there as the plants become exhausted by it all. I've learned the hard way to not procrastinate too much on end-of-year garden cleanup. 

Happily we're still getting some real nice tomatoes. Not lots of them, but just enough to enjoy the bacon/tomato/mayo sandwiches we love to make this time of year.  

Thanks Ken... I fixed Rob's link.  :)

One of my favorite songs of my youth- April Come She Will. From Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence Album, 1966. I loved the song then when I was 12, but it's even more meaningful to me now that I'm older.

Written by Paul Simon, usually sung by Art Garfunkel.

Lyrics:

Truly a timeless song.
Here is Art Garfunkel singing it in 1966:

Cheap school instruments= plastic recorders, plastic ukeleles, cardboard dulcimers, plastic or metal p.whistles.

I've always wondered why schools don't use penny whistles instead of recorders. They are cheaper and are based on a simpler counted-hole method of scales, like the dulcimer is. I've noticed a distinct similarity between dulcimers and p.whistles in terms of playing different modes- both are based upon the ionian mode, with aeolian being quite accessible as well. (ionian home on 3rd fret dulcimer, 3rd hole whistle) Both are easily played in the most common keys as well. P.whistles would certainly be much more portable and durable for kids to take for practicing at home.

Nate, I thought about making it into an entire new Group... but of course then it might have confused everyone.

Indeed, I've known Robin to kick a few shins along the way.  

Kendra it's just a common old saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks". I wouldn't take it personally. 

Nate here's what you get for your budget.  

This is a forum discussion dedicated to discussing how cool FOTMD member @Nate is.

Let's hear it for NateMan!!   Nate builds the coolest creative dulcimers and instruments, often using unconventional materials and original designs. Here is his page: https://fotmd.com/nate

Here is just one video showing a fraction of his many talents:

Robin- show me the money.

Randy- sounds like a total lifestyle to me. 

Do you want me to work you up a price quote for that job Nate?  

I could actually change everything about this site... how it is structured, how it looks, and how it functions.

i think people have gotten more used to mobile-favoring 'endless scroll feed' social software like twitter, YT, tiktok, and facebook. I myself find it very frustrating to try and navigate websites on my phone when a website encompasses multiple different areas such as forums, videos, profile pages, photos, events, and home feeds. For most websites that are not feed-scroll based, I'm way more comfortable navigating from a laptop or tablet. The original ED site was really just a PHP forum (no multimedia sections), which was pretty easy to navigate as well.

I'm sorry I can't realistically make FOTMD more intuitive and simple for everyone to figure out. Maybe if I simplified fotmd by removing the Groups feature altogether (leaving just the Forums area instead), it would remove some of the periodic confusion that people seem to have about Groups and how to participate in them?

Kendra, are you referring to within the Galax Group?  If so... you made a Comment on the group's comment wall, which is simply a feed, not a discussion with formal 'replies'. Also, you created a new discussion a few hours ago in the group, about the Galax festival, but it has not had any replies yet from others, so there are no replies to see yet in that discussion.

If you are referring to a different discussion you made in a different group, please say so here.

Also, it helps us if you say what kind of device you are looking at/working from... a phone, laptop, tablet, or desktop?  And if possible, give a LINK to the place or discussion you are having trouble in.

Our backyard blueberries are winding down, while the tomatoes are now gearing up. Yet another cobbler!

This concept puts me in mind a bit of past blog posts i made long ago, like these two:

https://dulcimer-noter-drone.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-is-it-taking-so-long-for-me-to.html

https://dulcimer-noter-drone.blogspot.com/2011/01/down-with-tyrant-carrot-or-dont-punch.html

I read that Kurt Vonnegut said this. Not sure how accurate that is, but i love the message!:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’

“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’

“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”

There is some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wonder_as_I_Wander

I read what JJ Niles wrote about it in one of his books... that he 'fleshed out' the tune after hearing a girl singing it. He claimed he heard only a brief 'crude snippet' and that he composed the rest, but i suspect the girl sang more than just a snippet. From my readings years ago, I concluded that Niles had a tendency to take credit for composing stuff that already existed. I do feel he likely added chords to embellish the unaccompanied ballad.

Hi @john-w-mckinstry and @ken-longfield , I think this issue is now fixed.

Please post again if the problem reappears.  Thanks!

Another thunderstorm coming, so I picked a load of green beans before everything got drenched...

Thanks Ken, this is helpful in showing the issue is occurring both on windows and mac.

I am seeing the problem as well, and will try to get it corrected this coming week. Thanks!

Hi Linda!  Hopefully @debbie-kopp-simpkins will see your post and reply here.
If not, perhaps you can call the church and check that the group is still meeting there, and maybe they can also help you get in touch with one of the group members as well. Have fun with your dulcimer! 

Try doing a hard refresh while actually on that error page:  hold down Control key and press F5. Again, try shutting down your laptop completely, and then start it again. (Don’t just hit ‘restart’)

John, can you please post links here of two videos that are giving you this error?

And... have you tried restarting your computer or device? Have you also tried closing and then re-opening your browser?

Is the problem happening on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer for you? Have you checked if it happens on one of your other devices as well?

thanks!

Great info- thanks so much, Editor! (and best of luck for DPN!)