Forum Activity for @ken-longfield

Thanks for sharing your good news Jen. It's good to have you back and I hope you stay active. Let us know if you have any questions.

Ken

"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

Hi everyone! I’ve actually been a member for years, and may have introduced myself years ago. But it’s been a long time since I played dulcimer as the one I had was, well, more of a wall decoration than a playable instrument. I’ve been looking for a better one for a long time that I could afford, and finally found one that arrived on my doorstep just a few hours ago. It’s a beautiful Bill Berg teardrop, that has the ability to have 5 strings but it was restored by John Keeton to have a conventional 4 string setup, with doubled melody strings and just the one bass string. You can see it in my profile pic. I’m so happy with this beautiful instrument. The action is gorgeous. I’ve only ever tried to play with a noter because of some hand health issues but the action on this is so nice and easy I may actually be able to learn some chords too! I’ll be around the forums, gleaning the wisdom of all of you more advanced players!

Jen Landry, Gardner MA

Enjoy your new to you dulcimer. Like John, over the years I've built several McSpadden kits; always for others. I'm glad to you found an instrument you like because it means you will play it often. If you need any other help let us know.

Ken

"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

Good going!  We're happy that you got a nice dulcimer at a nice price.  To me it sounds like you bought a McSpadden dulcimer kit that was assembled by Bob Thomason. 

McSpadden makes great kits. I've assembled several over the years, and in fact i have one now that I assembled, but swapped out the walnut top it came with for a custom buckeye one that looks like birch or spruce.  Looks and sounds great.

Thank you, everyone! Checking out the dulcimer went well and I ended up taking it home. It turned out to not be a McSpadden – looks like the maker is Bob Thomason out of Georgia and the case is a McSpadden – but it's still a lovely instrument that plays well and it was a fine price. Playing it has gone well so far, too – nice rich sound.

Scroll to the bottom of this page on Terry McCafferty's website for a little information: 

https://www.mccaffertydulcimers.com/frequently-asked-questions

Rule # 2     Play it some more....

If YOU like the way it looks, if YOU like the way it sounds, it means more than ANY makers mark or vintage. A dulcimer that you like is infinitely more likely to be played and not put in the closet.

Of course if this is a hour glass, you'll need to get a teardrop too. And perhaps one with/without the extra frets, and one for....

DAS is real.

I am looking at a Barringer # 58 like new condition any input on his work and possible value?

Rule #1 for purchasing a dulcimer: If possible, PLAY IT.

Dulcimers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and you need one which fits YOU. Even if you can barely play, putting it on your lap will help you decide whether it fits you.

Don't worry if you can't put it in proper tune, if one string will play you can get a pretty good sense of the tone which the body shape and size provides, and you can check for things like buzzing. Fingering each fret in order can be used to check for a warped stick or high frets. If your ear is decent, you can use Fret 7 (the octave) to roughly check fretting, nut, and bridge problems.

Generally any McSpadden, or other big name instrument, made within the past 20 years is likely to be OK if there is no visible damage, although a good look at tuners, etc. is good advice.

There are no really good price guides for used instruments except eBay and Reverb asking prices. If you can't play it, always check shipping charges, etc. since these are sometimes more than the instrument price.

Don't worry if you don't understand all this, but see if you and the instrument are a comfortable and pleasing match. You should be looking for a "lifetime companion," not a "trophy spouse." You may need more than one date, don't rush it.

My friend Richard has given you some solid advice.  Check the tuning pegs as well, for smooth turning.  And listen for any buzzing sounds as you play it.  Hopefully there won't be any, but if so, they can be fixed pretty easily.  Sounds like you found a treasure!

Thanks for asking. We are here to help each other.

Congrats. That may be a good find. Ask if kept in smoke free home. Also if stored in the main part of the house, not a basement, attic, garage, shed or rental storage unit. Check the date of manufacture. There should be a label in the melody side lower sound hole. Check that all joints are tight without any showing signs of separation. The overall finish and appearance will tell how much it may have been used. and how well it has been cared for.  I saw  one once labeled "as new" that had marks on the lower bout which looked like a cat had used it for a scratching post.  Check the strings for rust/oxidation. They can be changed easily enough. 

Regarding price: look at the McSpadden website and see what a new dulcimer sells for similar to what you are looking at. My personal standard is not to pay more than about 40-50% of the new price if the sellers dulcimer is in great shape.

If you have a dulcimer friend to go with you, sometimes 2 sets of eyes are better than one set. If you have questions about this particular dulcimer, the folks at McSpadden have always been very helpful when I have called them.They will need the info from the label (take a picture of it through the sound hole).

Personally over my time with the dulcimer, I have been fortunate enough to purchase 2 McSpadden dulcimers and one Warren May dulcimer which had been purchased but never played. Sometimes those things happen.

I am sure you will get some further responses as well. Best wishes on your find.

Hi friends, I'm looking for a Blue Lion teardrop dulcimer. It's one of the few models of BL that I don't have.  :-) I travel a lot and would love to bring along a BL (usually I bring a McSpadden Ginger - but my heart belongs to BL - what can I say). I don't need a beauty - in fact something well-loved would be wonderful (but no odors/smoking/nicotine - I'm allergic!). If you have a teardrop Blue Lion that you aren't playing and want to re-home (I'll take excellent care of it), and reasonably priced, please let me know. Thanks in advance! PS I live in San Diego

Apologies if this is already posted elsewhere (or should be posted elsewhere on this forum!). I just lucked out and found a McSpadden mountain dulcimer in my area for sale on Facebook Marketplace. It belonged to the seller's father-in-law and she said he kept it in mint condition, but doesn't seem to know much about the instrument. I've arranged to take a look at it on Wednesday night – what are some things I should look for to make sure it's in good shape? Thank you for any advice you might have!

Hi kids, just me Jon again. I just thought I would pass on something that I just learned from Dean Robertson. I was watching one of his videos and I noticed that he put his middle finger on top of his ring finger to do bar chords. Hey it works pretty darn good feels a little awkward at first but much easier for me to do bar chords this way, just thought I'd share.

I had never heard of Amanda, but I've become a fan if this is typical of her work.  What a wonderful tribute to Joni.
I have been a Joni fan since I first saw her in Toronto in 1964, when she was still Joni Anderson.

Dwain gave you a very good run down on the various aspects of wound strings. In the end, if you experiment with different strings, it all depends on the sound you like. It is interesting to note (pun not intended) that the sound you hear as a player is not necessarily the sound someone listening to you play hears. Strum you dulcimer strings a few times and listen. Then ask someone to strum the strings while you sit about ten feet away from the dulcimer. Does it sound the same? Is there a difference? When you play you hear the sound from above and maybe slightly behind the dulcimer. When listen from ten feet away you hear the sound from a lateral position. Another aspect is volume which drives me crazy with our dulcimer group. Folks play to hear themselves, but five feet away your can hardly hear them. Put some force in to that strumming, I tell them. It might work for a quarter of one verse of a song.

Ken
"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

The choice of string and string size depends on the instrument you have, the voice quality it is capable of, the voice quality you want, the tuning scheme you want for its strings, and the vibrating string length ( aka VSL, the distance between the nut and the saddle).

There are various tools to help get the right string set. But there are some surprises to be gained in unconventional string choices.

No wonder you're getting brain swell!

But if you furnish more details than listed above, luthiers and musicians can give some guidance. Regarding what you did list, here's a luthier's experience with them:

80/20 bronze refers to the mixture of copper and tin in a the windings of a wound string. It can be initially bright, even bell-like, but quickly loses its brilliance. But that will depend on the tension of the string, which is determined by the VSL and the pitch it is tuned to.

Phosphor Bronze is a warm wound string that holds its warmth and brilliance over a range of tensions, though higher tension will bring out its brilliance too.

Flat-top wound strings have the winding flattened to relieve the 'zing' during quick traverses from note to note without raising the finger. Some people do not appreciate the slight loss of brilliance that results with flattening the tops of the round winding wire.

Nickel wound strings are quite a bit more brilliant than 8/20 or Phosphor Bronze.

Plain steel wire is used for higher pitches and/or to control the finger pressure needed to firmly fret the string's note. Steel strings can be chosen by gauge (measured in thousandths of an inch, in my experience), to define the tension at which a string is operating when tuned to a designated pitch.

As for XS and XT strings, that seems to be a D'Addario innovation that alters the warmth of the string with coatings. Here is a video illustrating the difference between XS and XT strings.

As for string gauge, or diameter,  these choices usually involve the pitches you want the strings tuned to (the tuning scheme), the instrument's VSL, the warmth vs brilliance you want, and the optimum finger pressure for fretting notes. All those will depend, also, on the qualities of the music instrument you are concerned about.

Hope that helps!

Only one of my current dulcimers uses a wound bass string. I have always preferred a nickel wound string when a wound string is called for.

A string is a string is a string. You don't need to pay too much attention to the instrument type on the string package:::just the gauge, and end style. Just make sure it is long enough to fit your dulcimer.

You can purchase sets that include typical sizes for the dulcimer or individual strings of the correct size and style, plain or wound. Years ago before I started getting a friend to make my strings from bulk music wire, I purchased all ball end strings in groups of 3 of each of the sizes my instruments used. It is easy to cut the ball end out of the loop, and have a loop left if you do not need the ball end. That way you do not need an inventory of both loop end and ball end in each size.

The strothers string gauge is a good place to start to help determine the gauge you need. List the VSL and the note to which you wish to tune. Some think it tends to run a bit light on the recommendations and suggest going to a slightly heavier string.  https://www.strothers.com/string_choice.html

Juststrings.com is going out of business. Another source I have used is  https://www.stringsandbeyond.com/aboutus.html

I hope this helps. Thanks for asking. That is the way to learn when you have questions.

Hey kids, here we go again. I think this musical journey is starting to hurt my head. any one out there know of a good website or link about strings.  Looks like there's 80/20 bronze, phosphor bronze, nickel bronze,  flat top, nickel wound, XS plain steel, XT plain steel, and so on. Then of course we have gauge sizes.  I think my brain is starting to swell 

You can make a stable, playable dulcimer which is only a stick. You just won't hear much without adding a sound box or putting it on a table top resonator.

The cardboard dulcimers are a good example. The structure is usually a piece of 1x2 lumber with a modest strum-hole. Once tuned and settled in, the cardboard dulcimers will often hold relative tuning for months when stored in a cloth bag, and only need a touch-up when string tension is affected by room temperature changes.

I'm not a fan of hollowed out fret boards, etc. I'm not convinced they can be proven to make better music. When I build, I like the basic stick and box construction. I think pear and hour glass box shapes, fancy woods, lots of sound holes, etc.are mostly decorative.Box size does definitely affect the sound produced.

Decoration is fine, but should be seen as such. I put ebony or mother-of-pearl dots on my simple sticks and prefer trapezoidal boxes with shaped holes to rectangles with round holes. Sometimes I paint folkish designs on the boxes.

I can appreciate fancy dulcimers just as I can appreciate an Aston-Martin car - but I drive a basic small car and enjoy playing "cheap" instruments.

That makes sense wally, thanks.

It seems there are a lot of different aspects of the build that could affect how it handles tension. Bracing, full length fretboard vs discontinuous, whether the fingerboard is hollowed, how deep the strumhollow is, how thin the boards are, how high you keep your tension, etc. 

It makes sense to me that the ends of the fingerboard would slowly and gradually bow upward, but with a quality dulcimer it sounds like the consensus is that it's negligible.

I made my first dulcimer over 50 years ago. I've accumulated quite a few since then. Some instruments may only come out of a case once every five years or more. I have never detuned the strings and have noticed no particular ill effects on the these dulcimers. If anything, the strings maybe need to be changed after such a long time. But the the dulcimers themselves are fine.

Ken

"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

https://ebay.us/m/EcRFQT

here’s the link if anyone is interested.

I taught engineering mechanics (Statics, Dynamics, and Strength of Materials - the courses which drove students out of Engineering) for a quarter of a century. My view is based on a lot of 'book larnin.' Over the years some of us develop structural intuition just as musical intuition grows for some and not others.

My remarks are focused on "true dulcimers" with 3 or 4 strings and a stick which runs the full length of the VSL. The body is relatively narrow and the tension of the strings is modest. The sides, front, and back are sort of a stiff tube. The tension causes the body and fret board to curve very, very slightly and the wood to "creep" slightly over a period of days and "settle in."

An acoustic guitar body has only modest amounts of bracing inside, and the heavy wound steel core strings create a much larger tensile force. Solid body guitars are very different structurally.

A fiddle body is actually a complex shell shape, and the string tensions are rather low. On many fiddles the strings have a gut or nylon core.

On a modern instrument of these families the body might actually be graphite reinforced plastic. Tension will still cause minuscule bowing of the body, but there will be no creep.

There are no simple answers or explanations for such questions. I'm still trying to fully comprehend musical modes and remember chord structures.

The advice to loosen the strings is common for guitars.  But string tension on guitars is much greater than that on dulcimers, and dulcimers have the ultimate brace (meaning the fretboard) keeping things intact.  Tuning down a little bit, as John and Nate have suggested, is probably a good idea but may not be necessary unless environmental conditions are going to change drastically. If the instrument is just going to sit in your closet, I wouldn't worry about it.  If you are putting it in a storage unit in the desert with no climate control, you may run into problems that loosening the strings won't solve.

P.S. Congrats on your McCafferty dulcimer. I love mine, which is evidenced in how "used" it now looks.

"but, in my opinion, the minute aspects of wooden bodies' shapes are better preserved if string tension it maintained. "

Im curious to know more about this Wally. Are you basically saying that the wood "settles" when its kept under the correct amount of tension?  Or that the changes in tension would put more stress on the wood cells/finish? Both of those would make sense to me.

Id say that detuning the strings by just a little bit is a good idea. While some instruments seem to hold up really well to warping over time...other fare less well. Damage from tension, sunlight, or moisture would be cumulative over a long time. So overall, I'd say that you dont need to be overly concerned, but it's probably better to store it with the strings somewhat detuned if youre not planning on playing it for a while. It would probably only make a small difference over a long time though, if at all.

String instruments which are played regularly are typically "kept in tune" for many decades on end.

Strings may be damaged by age or environmental factors, of course, but, in my opinion, the minute aspects of wooden bodies' shapes are better preserved if string tension it maintained. If you unbox a dulcimer with loose strings it usually takes several tunings to get it to hold properly. Tension also keeps the "bridge" and nut secure.

Wooden pegs are another matter. They and the matching holes will undergo changes in roundness with changes in humidity. That's why moving a dulcimer from Phoenix to Seattle may require attention by a luthier.

If you have a 10 million dollar violin, controlled storage conditions are probably in order, but the primary benefit goes to the gut strings and horsehair on the bow.

If your dulcimer is worth less than $10,000, keep it in the case and keep it out of rain, snow, deserts, and floods. Storing it in direct sunlight probably isn't beneficial, but a lot of wall-hanging dulcimers stay playable.

Jon, I think that would be a good idea myself.  That way they won't stretch out unevenly over time.  Throwing some of those little dessicant packs in the case to keep down moisture might be a good idea as well.

Hi kid's once again it's me Jon Lilley. with one more of those silly questions. I just recently obtained my second instrument, a Terry McCafferty dulcimer, wonderful  instrument. but here's my question: if you are going to store an instrument for any length of time, should you loosen all the strings?

er wait...I guess one of the images worked....go figure

Don't bother with the attachments...They didn't turn out...

I did a quick look through E-bay and Reverb sites & completed sales..Selling on the high end for 900 ish, low end 3-4.

hundreds.

I do say though, yours is the best looking one!

I sent a link to a Facebook post about Jim Good. As you can see he made five string dulcimers; two melody strings, a middle string, and bass strings. He was an excellent craftsman and his instruments are treasured by those who own them. Your dulcimer appears to be in very good condition. Non-mechanical (wood) tuning pegs are not desired by many folks today and may affect the selling price of the dulcimer. It isn't easy to estimate a price for an instrument like this. If you put it on eBay and find a couple of folks who want a Jim Good dulcimer it could go for $500 or more. If you put a fixed price on it and sold through this website or one of the Facebook dulcimer websites you could probably sell it for $300-$350.

Ken

"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."

Hello everybody! I am posting here to see if anyone has any information about Jim Good dulcimers. I recently inherited this one and it is dated from 1981. he has signed and dated this one as well. Curious to see how I could go about selling this or if anyone has any history or an approximate value.

any information is greatly appreciated!

Thanks. So good to know.

Here are some issues to consider when shipping items internationally. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that years ago I received a surprise bill from US Customs for $75 two months after receiving a custom instrument from a luthier in UK. The luthier/sender had no knowledge of this. You may or may not experience one or more of the following factors, and things can change over time. But it's good to be aware:

1-- The sender(or seller) and the receiver (or buyer) involved in an international transaction need to know if there are additional charges associated with receiving the package. On a recent transaction out of country, a receiver was charged more than $30 for taxes and import fees on a package valued at $45.. These charges to the receiver were not disclosed to the sender when the parcel shipped. When the buyer finalized the purchase he did not realize there would be additional charges due when the package arrived.

2- Get a firm commitment from the recipient in writing that he or she will accept the package even if there are additional charges for which he or she would be responsible..

3- The sender should provide to the shipping company an email and or a phone number for the recipient. 

4- The sender needs to know if the parcel is not deliverable for any reason if the parcel will be returned or destroyed. If the parcel is to be returned to the sender is he or she is then responsible for any import fees or taxes prior to return of the parcel. If the parcel is to be destroyed will the insurance cover the cost of the item in the destroyed package.

5- Mark the package return to sender if undeliverable, if that is what you want and if you are willing to pay the cost of returning it to you undelivered.

6- Tracking information for international shipments is not always accurate nor up to date.

Though I'm not sure, I think Mr. Gallier is no longer building.  

Hello everybody once again it is just me Jon trying to pick everybody's brain. I was looking into getting a Gary Gallier Dulcimer

I'm intrigued with his innovative design. Anyone out there have one and what is the V.S.L. on these things?  I noticed that he Gary is not really big on communicating. Thanks again

On reflection-I still play,but would hesitate to record, the music of my youth(Ottawa Valley style).A lot of it has been recorded many times over,why do it again?