Extended Range Dulcimer
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
Well let me close the circle. @Barnjam started this thread because he found it difficult to fret the middle string, so he sought a longer dulcimer with extended range on each individual string. If you click the link to Ron Gibson's "extended range" dulcimer that @Marko provides, you will see that the strings are very close together and there is little room on the outside of the melody and bass string. My hands are not that large, but I would find the fretboard on that dulcimer to be insufficiently wide. Folkcraft also created a 5-string dulcimer called the MaxDAD, which was basically a standard and a bass dulcimer together. It was tuned DADAD (not sure how to indicate the octaves there). But their first version of it did not work precisely because the strings were too close together. So they widened the fretboard to make it more comfortable to play. One reason I don't own any McSpaddens is that despite the consistently high quality of the tone, the fretboard is so narrow that if you bend the bass or melody string, you often move the string off the end of the fretboard.
What this demonstrates, I think, is that the wideness of the fretboard and the distance between strings is an important variable, perhaps more important that VSL even, and yet it is one that gets little attention either by builders or by players.
I don't know how practical it might be to build a longer dulcimer to add more frets and perhaps get an extra octave on each string, but the issue @Barnjam is dealing with is a common one that should be addressed by builders and players as we customize our instruments.
