I was wondering that too Irene. Fretting a fretboard that is already installed is a major problem. Even if you use staple frets, all that hammering can do a LOT of damage...
No reason they won't work. You may have to enlarge the holes a bit -- it depends on the diameter of the shaft relative to the diameter of the hole. Check the specs on those Grover 8Ns for shaft size.
A few minutes work would have made those wooden tuners work just right...
I just got off the phone with Jim Woods at McSpadden. One of our dulcimer friends has an old McSpadden -- 1967 vintage; and was told by Lynn McSpadden not to put anything else on there. Well, 50 years later, that dulcimer is just a bit dusty and in need of refreshing!!
Jim told me that "back in the day" they used "furniture wax" -- carnuba wax, that is -- on those dulcimers. So if you've got an oldie McSpad that needs a facelife, hunt up some carnuba wax and get polishing!
Saltsprings! Look around and see if there's a Produce Co-op in your area. We get 98% of our veggies these days from the SWFL Produce Co-op. Great quality veg and MUCH cheaper than Publix! We're both Pescatarians (fish/seafood once/twice a week) and eat a LOT of veggies. I spend $30-40 at the co-op for what would cost me twice that from Public or any of the megamarts.
Check out my weekly Fooding Around With The Kilted Cook food-blog. I have hundreds...thousands of great, easy to prepare vegetarian and other recipes that I've posted over the past five years. Just yesterday, among other things, I posted a recipe for Mexican-flavored white bean burgers that are really simple to make and outstanding great flavor
There have been a number of complaints about the Seagull Merlins not having correct fret spacing and very few frets. Seagull makes decent guitars but whoever is making the stick instrument Merlins for them is apparently not doing particularly well. Definitely what I would call a "try before you buy" situation!
I think it was a decent buy for $50. Very strange setup, that for certain. Not "old style fret placement", just a plain Diatonic layout, but with a HUGE blank run at the head from the Nut to the break over the edge of the tuning head!!
Almost looks like the wrong fretboard was installed on the body. Or the wrong VSL scale was used to cut the frets -- that board could have a much long VSL... Maybe the strum hollow was cut and the frets installed from the wrong end. The sound holes are a strange mishmash too, with the trefoil between two round holes.
The body appears to be mahogany veneer, and heavily braced inside.
I take it there is no maker's label visible through the holes. I'd say YES it's a commercial build, probably from Asia (just a hunch) or at least somewhere that did/does not understand how the fretboard is supposed to be on a dulcimer.
I play, nearly exclusively, Noter&Drone, with a bit of Fingerdancing (a.k.a. Melody Drone) when I'm picking out a new tune and writing my own tab. Why? It is the old traditional 'high silver' sound with drones that I fell in love with 40 years ago. Something about the drones "strikes a chord" in me, as it were!
No need to try and find or remember a bunch of complicated chord shapes, the melody is right there as I walk my finger or Noter up and down the melody string. Left-hand wise, I strum more or less of the three strings depending on the mood of the tune -- usually to the rhythm of the words rather than some metronomic fixed beat.
I play mostly American Roots music and the Scots/Irish/English folk songs that those tunes derived from -- Shady Grove and the ancestral tune it derived from, Matty Groves a.k.a. Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, for example.
FYI -- in the dulcimer world we don't talk about "scale length". We use the term Vibrating String Length -- VSL.
IFF you used Titebond (or hide glue) in the glue-up, you may be able to use a heat gun, aimed at the fretboard/top junction along both sides, to soften the glue (even after years) and gently pull the fretboard off.
"Upper" strings??? No such thing. Dulcimers are not vertical instruments!
Do you mean the strings closer to you than farther away? Or higher pitched versus lower pitched? Or melody versus middle drone versus bass strings?
As Skip says, there is no "proper" tuning or a 3, 4, 5 or 6 string dulcimer; just a number of possibilities depending on the kind of music you want to play and how you want to play it.
Played Music On The Beach -- no porch at our weekend retreat place on Sanibel island. And darn few people. You'd think there was a hurricane warning or something. But Dorian was a very Minor impediment to a fabulous weekend of sun and Gulf waters.
I'm changing it to Play Music At The Beach Day.
Don't have a porch.
Going to Sanibel Island for Labor Day weekend, where there are miles and miles of white sand beaches.... and beach chairs. If the Dorian Modal Tropical Storm doesn't blow us away, I'll be playing down by the water....
Our cats react to my plying with complete indifference...
Hey Dusty -- Here's one of the good old sites. Very thorough:
www.contemplator.com
includes, with MIDI files and lyrics for most tunes:
Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and America
Francis J Child Ballads
Popular Songs in American History
Songs of The Sea
Turlough O'Carolan
Taylor's Traditional Tune Book
Contemplations on Life
The only thing you can get from guitar "tab" is get the sequence of accompaniment chords, not melody chords. A G chord is a G chord, a D chord is a D chord, regardless of instrument.
Try putting a tiny piece of toilet paper (a couple of thicknesses) under the string where it crosses the nut
Tung oil is an oil from the tung nut tree in Asia. Better than boiled linseed oil! Yes, it hardens. Get as pure of tung oil as you can -- some manufacturers adulterate it with other things. It works fine with stains that are dried.
Wolf tones like that can be notoriously hard to cure. However. This is probably something that has crept in from having the instrument used -- tuned, re-tuned, changing environments, etc. Start by slacking way off and then re-tightening the middle drone string, making sure that you have a snug fit in the notches at the nut.
FWIW, since strings can be tuned to any of 8 notes in an octave, we generally refer to them by their "course name", not the note they are tuned to. The dulcimer has a Melody course, the middle drone course, and the bass course. Each course can be 1 or 2 strings.
Finish -- I'm a big fan of Tung Oil. Rub on 4 coats of tung oil and call it good! But then I don't like deep mirror glossy finishes on anything.
Yep -- it's a kantele shape anyway, if unconventional in construction. I'd guess a "student" model.
I would start with what Ken Longfield suggests. To keep the strings from cutting into the edge of the top, I might use a thin (1/16" or 1/8") strip of wood about 1/4" wide, running across the junction of the top and back -- instead of a brass rod at the back edge as Ken suggests. Use a very hard wood -- at least as hard as hard maple -- and make sure the grain runs the length of the strip. The strip can be held in place with even rubber cement until at least a couple of strings are replaced, then string pressure will hold it.
What is that bridge made of? Metal?
I would start by recording and removing the strings, as Ken says, then a soft cloth dampened with soap water to see if those white stains and assorted crud can be wiped away. A few drops of WD-40 on each tuning pin near where they enter the wood might help things in that department.
Tuning Key -- You can use a clock key for those wind-up clocks; they come in a variety of sizes. You can use an L-shaped autoharp tuning wrench -- $15-20. Or you can get a 1/4" T-handle Tap Wrench from on-line sources ($3.99 Amazon) or a good hardware store for under $10. You want one that goes from 0 to 1/4", not one that goes from 1/4" up.
Strings -- if that is indeed how the strings are anchored you're going to need "ball-end" strings, not "loop-end"
I see what KenL means about the string anchor photo. The anchors appear to be on the rear side of the instrument and the strings are going over the edge of the top -- is that correct? I've never seen Baltic Psaltery that did not use a steel string bar on the rear deck to hold the tail ends of the strings -- as you can see in my photo below.
That is certainly a VERY uncommon way to build a kantele. You may not -- in fact -- have a kantele, but rather some other form of zither/psaltery. Can we see some less close-up photos of the instrument, please? Say a quarter of the instrument in each photo. and then frame-filling pix of the top and back so we can see the whole instrument
There are a whole spectrum of Baltic Winged Pslateries, each slightly different from the next. The Kantele is arguably the most well known, because of it's connection to the Kalevala. In Lithuania they're called Kankles; in Estonia, Kannel; in Ltvia they are Kokles or Kandla; in parts of Russua they're called Kusle,a nd in other parts Gusli; and the Norse Sami call them Harpu. I've built several over the years. Some of the originals were backless, but the vast majority are "carved body" construction -- a 2" thick plank is hollowed out, and then a thin soundboard is inset into the top so there is a sound box. The majority of them have a metal 'string bar' at the back and wooden peg or autoharp pins for tuning. They can have as few as 5 strings or as many as 18.
The photo below shows a Kiev style Gusli that I made for Lady Sally's daughter Holly who has a 17th century Kievan persona in the Society for Creative Anachronism. 6" wide, 1-1/2" deep.
Appropriate string gauges are a function of the VSL and the open notes that you want to tune the string to. Use the Strothers String Calculator as a start point: http://strothers.com/string_choice.html
Plug the VSL and your desired open notes into the calculator and use those gauges. You can go a gauge higher without any problem as the calculator tends to give light values.
Go to your page. Click on boxed word Photos below the dark yellow bar. A page called Photo Galleries comes up. Click the + then give the gallery a name, and select pix to upload (you can only upload 6 per day). I just did that with my Burnsville Holly Leaf build.
Yep. The Stew Mac calculator is pretty good.
I also use WFret a free program from the Musical Instrument Makers Forum. I like WFret because it allows you to print out a paper pattern that you can tack-glue to the fretboard and literally cut-on-the-dotted-lines, rather than mis-transferring numbers from a spreadsheet to wood.
For Just Intonated fret spacing on my Traditional dulcimers with staple frets, I use the calculator developed by Rob Reinsal here several years ago. It's discussed here: https://fotmd.com/strumelia/group_discuss/2457/latest-ji-calculator
If it were me, I'd fashion a tailblock from a 1/4" piece of complimentary wood and make the top of it the bridge, as shown in photo of my recent build. Instead of the single large string-pin in the tail, use three brass brads/tacks to hold the string loops. Of course you could make the tailpiece thicker -- a little, or a lot and notch it on top to install an ordinary bridge.
I agree that the green foam is not causeing any problems. But Warren made that dulcimer to be used with "ball-end" strings. If you remove those loop-end-strings and just slide ball-end strings in from the rear, it will surely look a lot nicer.
I would take it to Warren and ASK him about the instrument. He keeps good records and should know whether this was a "just intonation" fret scale or what exactly is going on.
I suspect the bridge may have been accidentally moved and not put exactly back in place. As little as 1/16" -- 1/8" would make all the difference.
WHO made you dulcimer? It should say on a label stuck to the inside bottom, if you look through the rear soundholes. Also, a close-up photo of the top and side of the bridge would be a big help. We might be able to see evidence of a move there.
What Banjimer said! The frets have not moved. The bridge may have moved. A reasonable close-up photo showing the whole instrument and a close-up of the bridge area would be helpful.
You're tuning to a specific fret? We don't really do that. We tune the dulcimer strings to DAA, DAd or something else, and then press the melody string(s) down at a specific fret (or make chords using all three courses of strings. Sorry if that sounds simplistic, I'm trying to understand.
When you aren't fretting, are the strings staying in tune at DAA, DAd or whatever you are tuned to? You say you "get one fret right but the others are off". Do you mean you are not getting a 'good' do, re, mi, fa... scale as you move up the frets on the melody string or on all three strings?
Without actually watching you, I suspect it's your technique at fault, not the dulcimer. Especially since it's not an every-time thing.
Your cheap guitar doesn't do it because, 1. You've been playing guitar longer; and 2. The mechanics/physical movements of a pull off with your hand wrapped around a neck vs. your hand on top of the fretboard are two completely different things. Apples and oranges.
VSL and tuning shouldn't matter one iota, unless your strings are a very wide mis-match for the tuning. and the strings are very floppy.
I eat Haggis and Black (a.ka. Blood) Pudding every time we go to the UK. I actually like both and would rather eat them than American Scrapple or Head Cheese, Braunschweiger or Goose Liver pate. I'm not otherwise fond of organ meats -- particularly the Mexican soup called Menudo -- cow stomach tripe in broth.
I've had Potted Rabbit, too, which appears in those Victorian novels, and is just a nice patè -- like Deviled Ham but not spicy -- and goes great on crackers. Very tasty.
The one thing I've eaten that I'll never touch again unless protocol and international relationships are at stake is Monkey Brains. I was served this delicacy at a Vietnamese party; a homecoming for my housemaid's husband. Doesn't taste like much except spicy chiles, but has a weird texture... Blah!
Skip's instructions are good, but it would be nice to see a picture of the dulcimer, and a close up of the nut. Was the original bridge wood or some other material. Basically you make a wedge about 3/8" tall by 1/4" wide by 1-3/4" or however wide your fretboard is.
I agree with the others -- a Hughes Church Dulcimer kit. The second dulcimer I built 40 years ago.
Replacing the Nut & Bridge should be straightforward as long as they aren't glued. If the Nut is glued, try heating it up with a heat gun or hair dryer on High for 10 minutes or so. That softens Titebond and Elmers glues. If all else fails you can cut them off and sand them down flat before making new ones from some of the scrap maple from your recent build, to sit on top.
As mentioned, the tuners could use at least a good cleaning. They weren't all that great of quality back in the day though... If they are, as I suspect, 3 tuners on a bar, you can get a replacement pair for about $10 from Stew Mac (I just checked the price).
