John, thanks for the song suggestions. I am not familar with any of the three songs, but that's why I asked the question, to learn a couple of new songs with the gait of Wildwood Flower.
john p said:
A couple of tunes I like to play round and around :
Pretty Saro
Suzy McGuire
Elk River Blues
Cheryl, I do enjoy playing "June Apple", but not familar with Spotted Cow. Sounds like a fun song. Thanks!
Cheryl James said:
I can think of a couple of similar tunes, I know several dulcimer players really love to play June Apple and Spotted Cow is another one than can go on forever because it's just so much fun!
Dusty, I consider myself a chord player, one-two- three finger chords on 3 stirngs. I do enjoy playing melody/drone also. While I do pick individual strings, I do a lot of strumming across all the strings. I have pondered over Going to Boston, now I'll take a good look and give it a try.
As always, thanks.
Dusty Turtle said:
Terry, can you tell us what style of dulcimer you play? Do you play melody/drone, do you chord, do you play across all the strings?
If you you play melody/drone, I would suggest Going to Boston. It lets you slide up and down the fretboard just like you do in Wildwood Flower.
Terry, can you tell us what style of dulcimer you play? Do you play melody/drone, do you chord, do you play across all the strings?
If you you play melody/drone, I would suggest Going to Boston. It lets you slide up and down the fretboard just like you do in Wildwood Flower.
A couple of tunes I like to play round and around :
Pretty Saro
Suzy McGuire
Elk River Blues
I'm addicted to John Stinsons #2 on dulcimer. Not sure why, just am.
Hey folks,
I am hankering for a new song to learn, a new song to love to play as much as I love playing "Wildwood Flower". I mean I can set and play that "Wildwood Flower" for 10 to 15 min. a shot and still want more. I love to play it up and down the fretboard in two octaves, sometimes mixing it up, sometimes with the melody string as lead and sometimes the bass.
While I am very familar with obtaining tab from "Everything Dulcimer", "Dogwood Dulcimer Association, etc., I am seeking a song from someone who loves that Wildwood Flower as much as I do, and has another song similar to WF that they love just as much, and enjoys playing it on and on and on.
Please tell me what that song is so I can get in on some of that fun.
Thank you.
Hi,
I've been doing a little playing with this instrument over the last couple of months. It would be good to get your harp checked out by a knowledgeable person - the chord felts may need replacing, a dull string may need replacing etc. Also the bars are usually taken off and rearranged in an order that makes for easier fingering. for eg grouping chords together that are common in songs (I, IV, V). An old harp needs to be checked for warping as well which can be fixable - or not depending on where the bowing is. If you've got yourself an Oscar Schmidt from the 70s, made in America, well those ones are reputed to have the best sound. Lucky you!
A couple of accessories you'll have to get is a tuning wrench - either gooseneck or T-style - and some finger picks - a thumbpick and finger picks for your index & middle fingers. Ha! Don't do what I did the first time I put the finger picks on and put them on so they resembled talons, curving over my fingernails. They go the other way, so they curve up and over the fleshy pad of your finger tip. I have a plastic thumbpick and metal fingerpicks.
http://daigleharp.com/helpandinfo.html
Strings, the felt pads, tuners and books can be bought from Elder Instruments
The Autoharp Owner's Manual (Orthey) has been recommended to me as a thorough book to have on this instrument.
Repair person: Chuck Daniels (in Arkansas)
I met Chuck at Winterfest in Irving Tx, earlier this year. He looked over 2 old autoharps for me and fixed them up to be playable again at a very reasonable price. Ask him about your Meg.
A very good teacher is Charles Whitmer. He has packets of music w/ instrumental CDs for sale. There's a lot to select from.
http://home.comcast.net/~whidbey/Whitmer-AHSheetMusic.pdf
More about Mr Whitmer here: https://sites.google.com/site/capitalharpersclub/songs-and-tunes
I was fortunate to be in 2 of his classes at Winterfest - I learned a lot. By day he's a high school music teacher - his students are lucky to have him!
http://cyberpluckers.org/teacherlist/index.html
check out Marc Gunn - celtic music on the autoharp - cool!
This forum is posted information rather than a forum of active users. I haven't had much luck finding an active forum for this instrument - but I haven't looked that hard either.
http://www.autoharpworks.com/phpbb/index.php?sid=f70b20fc7bb4751ebc5bf5b22cfc8458
Abilene Tx has an autoharp & dulcimer club. this is the contact email -
bcadclub @ gmail.com
The lady that replied to my queries, Carlene Wood was also helpful.
Lexie R Oakley said:
That was excellant Tom, thank you.
It was interesting that Stanley Hicks cuts the sides for his dulcimers from a solid piece of wood. He says it doesn't change the sound.
It would be interesting to know if any luthiers of today use this technique.
What fine craftsman each of these men are.
Ken is right - the chords your wife will need to learn to strum along to your playing would be the same chord names that you are playing on dulcimer. She is most likely to need the guitar chords D, G, A and perhaps Bm. Any simple guitar chord chart will show her the fingering for those chords on a standard tuned guitar.
Thanks for posting that. I've been wishing I had a hurdy gurdy for awhile now, and find myself coveting hers!
Wow Robin that sounds just wonderful!
The hardanger fiddle looked like one of the more interesting instruments in the documentary, perhaps because it is so recognizable as a modern violin with the exception of the sympathetic strings that echo a former era.
What a treat that must have been for you, Robin!
This is a great article - thanks for posting it Lisa.
Last month during my ski trip across the Skarvheimen in Norway, by chance, weskied tothe Geiterygghytta mountain hut on its 100th birthday and a local Hardanger fiddle player turned up in the evening and played for us 
It was wonderful to hear local tunes being played on the instrument right on its home turf. We had skied from the Hardangervidder that day. Janet Crane, who is a great old time fiddler, was with us on the trip so she got to play some Appalachian tunes on the Hardanger fiddle on a snowy winter night in a Norwegian mountain hut - how cool is that
Very cool. It's amazing how great she can play all those various instruments.
Well spotted Strel, saw this recently on the News and meant to mention it. Didn't realise it was still available.
We had a N/harp player at the club a few months back, she's been turning up at some point most years.
I love this!:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27205752
Great suggestions, Ken, in part because I know all those tunes. I already added "You are my Sunshine" and will probably add the two "Valley" tunes as well. Maybe the rest will make next year's list.
Kenneth W. Longfield said:
Dusty, a few we do here in the east are Down In The Valley, Red River Valley and You Are My Sunshine. There is also Clementine, Rocky Top and Tom Dooley.
Ken
"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."
Geekling, when you speak of the "jam in front of the festival" do you mean the small group that plays right in the entry to the church grounds? That jam is indeed intimidating and is not really a jam; it is more like a group of friends who already play together. But the festival holds another all-instrument jam towards the end of the day in which people sit in a big circle in that big room where they have lunch. People of a variety of levels join in, and Leo Kretzner leads the whole thing in a really inclusive manner. When I first joined I passed when it was my turn to call a tune, but the next time around I called out Southwind or Rosin the Beau or some tune I knew pretty well. I also just listened during a bunch of tunes I didn't know, and played chords for those whose structure I could figure out but whose melody was too fast to learn on the spot. But as I mentioned, I did learn two or three tunes over the course of the jam and for my first one, I was happy with the number of tunes I was able to play along. Now here we are two or three years later, and I've created my own list of 40+ jam tunes and I know them all! It's amazing how many tunes I've picked up over the last few years!
You two would look so cute playing a courting dulcimer! I can certainly see why that would be on your wish list.
Dusty, a few we do here in the east are Down In The Valley, Red River Valley and You Are My Sunshine. There is also Clementine, Rocky Top and Tom Dooley.
Ken
"The dulcimer sings a sweet song."
Geekling, I think you give us too much credit when you say our Sacramento group is "well thought out." It has taken us over a year-and-a-half to evolve to the structure I describe above. But now I think it works really well.
I'm not surprised that you say you need to have a tune in your head even if you use tab. After all, tablature doesn't give us very much. Especially that sparse tab that just provides fret numbers tells us nothing about how long to play each note, for example, so the tab assumes you already know the song.
Robin makes some good observations about ensuring that beginners are encouraged to join jams even if they don't know most of the songs. There is nothing wrong with muting the strings with your left hand and just strumming for rhythm. There is nothing wrong with just playing the easy parts of songs. I often join only by playing chords and not playing any melody at all (though I understand that as a guitar player for the last 40 years hearing chord changes comes easier to me than most). As Robin suggests, these ways of joining without fully knowing a song accomplish a central goal of getting people comfortable just playing with their instruments. Beginners need to know that it is encouraged to join in these ways.
Here and there online are several guides to jam etiquette, but what is not really found is advice on how to join jams if you don't already know the music.
Two surprises: I forgot "Shady Grove" until Robin reminded me (it is in my mind the quintessential mountain folk song) and no one mentioned "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." I know that's not really a dulcimer tune so much, but it seems to be central to the whole notion of a tradition shared among generations.
I decided to create a page on the River City Dulcimers website for my list and links to tab available online: common dulcimer jam tunes . It's still a work on progress, but I thank you all for your comments so far and welcome any others you have.
Robin, I, too, have been starting to "read" SMN, although I am not very proficient at playing directly from it. But following my daughter's beginning piano lessons over the last few years has been a nice refresher course. When I was a kid I could read SMN but in a very practical manner. I played trumpet one year but was switched to the baritone tuba the next. Baritone music was written in the bass clef rather than the treble clef, but what made the transition easy was that the fingering on the valves was the same between the two instruments -- well, almost the same. I think the baritone plays a fourth or fifth below a trumpet. So the fingering I had learned still played a major scale, but in a different key. I never actually learned what the key was and never really learned the note names on the bass clef (I knew how to figure them out, but could never identify them quickly enough). But I learned the play the baritone from SMN only by noting the distances between notes on the staff and the corresponding distances in the notes I would play. It's possible that way of playing hearkens back to the days when the musical staffs were not standardized and could be centered on any note. But I also think that method is close to the way some professional musicians play.
As you suggest, they do not see a note on the staff, translate it to the corresponding letter, and then look for that note on their instrument. I think they see relationships among notes on the staff and also see those relationships on their instruments. (I would think that visualization is easier on keyboards and fingerboards, but I bet brass and woodwind players see them, too.)
The other comment you make that I think is especially useful for everyone learning to play is that you concentrate on phrases rather than individual notes. We learn language that way, after all, why not music, too? And little by little we start to notice that certain phrases repeat in various songs, just as chord shapes do.
Thanks so much for your comments.
Hi Dusty - I really enjoyed reading about the Sac dulcimer group. It sounds like you have found a great way to keep everyone involved and challenged. I do think that giving beginners a few strategies for jams really helps them get engaged. If as a beginner you know that its OK to just play parts of a tune or just the chords or mute the strings and strum along in timethen you'll feel happier to experiment hands-on in the moment. And it is that experimentation that will lead to their progress.
Regarding TAB - I feel the same way about it you do 
I need to hear the music to get a feel for it. What I have been doing recently however is teaching myself to readsimple melody lines offstandard music notation(most of the tunes I want to playcan be found in SMN on Google images ). I say 'read' but what I actually am learning to dois to 'hear' the music on the page. TAB numbers are ugly to me - they tell me nothing about the music itself. But there is something magical about thenotes on the staff. I don't translate the dotsto note names, then find those notes on the dulcimer - that would be no better than writing out the TAB numbers. I've been working on hearing the tune as my eyes scan across the pattern. It takes me a while to hear a new tune. I have to use techniques like tapping my hand to get the timing right, or I may play a few notes on my dulcimer to get the pitch interval or a little phrase correct. But once I've got it I can then look at the music and hear the piece. I consider what I'm doing as learning to play by ear with my eyes It has proved to be a very useful skill to work on developing as so many of the old fiddle and folk tunes I want to play are available for free in SMN and I can learn by ear quickly as I can concentrate oneach littlephrase fast forward it, slow it down, repeat it, etc etc like I would with a recording but more instantly and just with my eyes scanning the dots.
Geekling, I think I remember that beginners jam. I walked briefly through the room and could see some difficulties there. In my opinion, a jam with experienced players can exist with no leader, with players taking turns calling a tune and starting it off. But beginners are exactly those who need a leader, someone familiar with the songs who can play them correctly and at a steady tempo so that others can follow along. Obviously, the leader in a beginners jam needs to be patient and play really slowly, but a bunch of beginners unsure of their own playing trying to make a go of it on their own just asks for trouble.
But your comments also reveal the different ways we learn. I honestly cannot learn songs from tablature. I need to hear a song played and get it into my head. During the jam at the Harvest Festival I probably learned three or four songs. The first time through I would just listen, getting a sense for the song's structure (AABB, ABC, whatever). The second time through I would try to find some of the important notes or phrases in each section. By the fourth or fifth time through I could get most of the melody. Then after that, I could go off on my own, use tab, and fill in the blanks. But I always fail to learn songs at workshops when everyone is handed a piece of tab and then they go through it slowly one note at a time. I never get the feel for a song that way.
In my opinion, the best scenario is an all-inclusive, beginners-welcome jam in which people go around a circle calling out tunes. The person calling the tune should ideally set the tempo and start playing. So a really advanced player might indeed start playing pretty fast, leaving others to just strum chords, play percussion on the backs of their dulcimers, or pick out a note here or there. But others will start playing at a slower, more approachable pace, allowing beginners to follow along. And there should be a leader to step in, so if someone starts a song but then gets a little lost, the leader can step in and take over. A lot of learning how to play with others is learning how to keep time and skip notes or whole sections of songs. When you play by yourself and you get stuck on the fourth note of a song, you can just stop and take your time to get it. But in a jam, the song keeps moving, and it's important to learn to play such that when you get stuck you skip a few notes or a whole section and pick a point in the future when you can jump in with everyone else. (Supposedly the great hockey player Wayne Gretsky used to say you should not skate to where the puck is, but to where the puck will be.)
At the local dulcimer group here in Sac that I started about 18 months ago, we now divide our time into three sections. The first is a beginners lesson in which the beginners get together in a very small group of two or four with a more experienced player and go over some basics. During the second section we all get together and play through our small but growing repertoire of songs, mostly arrangements by Ron Beardslee, Paul Furnas, or myself, which are pedagogical in nature, meaning we arranged a tune in order to work on some aspect of playing. (For example, I arranged a version of "Shall We Gather at the River" specifically to work on slow, steady, back-and-forth strumming. My arrangement of "Beach Spring" centers on the use of left-handed techniques such as slides, pull-offs and hammer-ons. Ron has arranged several songs that teach chord positions, so each song is based on a single chord shape that moves up and down the fretboard.) We all play those songs together, and usually between 4 and perhaps 10 times each one. The idea is to play them long enough that people can really start to learn them. But we also stop and talk about how to play difficult sections so that there is some clear learning going on. And the third section of our gathering is a true song circle where we take turns playing songs. Some choose songs for everyone to join in, but this section of our gathering is also for more advanced players to "show off" the more complex stuff they're working on. The advanced players get practice performing in front of a small (and adoring ) group and the beginners get exposed to music and playing techniques that they would never see if they only stayed in beginner groups. Interestingly, it was the beginners who requested the song circle, for they wanted to see what Ron and I were playing when we were not teaching them songs, but I have to say I've really gotten a lot out of it, and knowing that I'll have that small audience encourages me to keep working on new stuff and really try to get whole songs down pat.
Maybe this is a long-winded way of saying that I think beginners would get a lot more out of a jam with patient leaders rather than a jam with no leaders and only other beginners.
Wow, you guys are great! The challenge for me has been to resist just listing songs that I know and like to play. And as I said, I've only once been to a dedicated dulcimer jam but have a lot more experience with bluegrass jams, old timey jams, and just plain old campfire sing-a-longs. It is likely that some tunes (Saint Anne's Reel? Whiskey Before Breakfast?) are on the list for their ubiquity more at bluegrass jams than at dulcimer jams. But I like most of your suggestions (there are a couple that I never heard of!), and all of them that I already know will be added to the list. A few (June Apple, John Stinson #2, Columbus Stockade) will be added to my "to learn" list and may get promoted if I learn the tune in time.
My plan right now is basically to do what Robin and Ken suggest: to list the tunes with links to the main two or three websites (ED most obviously) that contain tab. There is also a copy machine at the venue, and I think it might be good to have some hard copies of tab for people who don't plan ahead or drop in at the last minute or can't play at all by ear. If I get super-ambitious I might make several copies of tabs for each of the songs, but I can do that at work and pass the cost on to my employer. Since I mostly telecommute I end up using my own cash for ink and paper and stuff like that on a regular basis, so it seems like a fair trade.
Rob, I am sure you are right about regional variations, but the list I've come up with was based on my sense of common tunes that I've seen online either here or on a couple of the jam tunes lists at various other websites from around the country. It's kind of funny, but I think here in Northern California the only regional variation is that every jam has to include a Grateful Dead tune or two. Seriously, last year at this same event I attended a song circle at the end of the day. A few of us were playing many of the songs on the list above, but there was also a group of listeners who just sat quietly with smiles on their faces. Then someone started playing and singing "Ripple" and everyone in the crowd began singing. I mean these are old (and yes, I mean old) deadheads who probably can't remember what they had for breakfast, but they know every word to "Ripple" and have been singing it for 40 or more years! (I commented elsewhere that they used to take acid and now take antacid, but the song remains the same!And for the record, I'm not knocking the Dead; I attended more than my fair share of shows, too, and especially like their acoustic stuff, not surprisingly.)
Thanks, everyone, for your advice and suggestions!
Dusty, I think you have a good list. There's a lot of regional variations in tunes played at dulcimer jams. There are several on your list that aren't played around here. Up here you'll also hear "Needle Case," "Petronella," "Columbus Stockade Blues," and "You are my Sunshine."
