I just made a twelve string guitar
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Oh Dick what a marvelous story, and such great photos!It made my evening to read it. :)
Forum Activity for @strumelia
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Oh Dick what a marvelous story, and such great photos!It made my evening to read it. :)
I just made a twelve string guitar
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
That trick worked like a charm -- when Matt stepped into the restaurant, he said to his wife and son, "That guy looks a lot like Pappy." (It's true, I do.) I'll post a couple more shots -- the first, taken by Matt's wife Nancy, showing the happy camper after he got it home:
That's to show off the kid (Kathy and I made him, too); and the quilt on the wall behind the kid (Kathy also made that, about 15 years ago). Here's one closeup of the axe:
That inlay is my "Kolibri" maker's mark, since 1992. This guitar is only Kolibri #4; I spend much larger amounts of my life not out in the wood shop. Kolibri is "hummingbird," in Russian (and many other languages). There are, technically, no hummingbirds native to Russia; but the first two Kolibri instruments were balalaikas (a sekunda for Kathy, and a kontrabass for me). Those larger sizes are hard to find for sale, so I just made them. Kolibri #3 is a regular (six string) dreadnought guitar, and is featured on some tracks of the CDs recorded by our other son, Ben: http://www.myspace.com/benhulanmusic That 6-string was the first guitar I made, but Matt was the first kid we made. And all of the above -- wife, kids, various instruments and whatnot -- even 12-string guitars -- have given me a lot of joy, over a lot of years. Here, for example, is one from the summer of 1965:
I rest my case.Dick
I just made a twelve string guitar
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
WOW, that is cool Dick. That's on my to do list also, for my brother that plays guitar. Thanks for showing.Bill
I just made a twelve string guitar
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Well actually I started it in 2002, but got distracted... these things are a lot of trouble to make, and after I got the basic box made I put it away for a looong time. It was supposed to be a Christmas present for my elder son, then 33. This summer I decided it was time to get off the dime and finish it; so for over a month, unbeknownst to him, I've been doing stuff like drilling the holes for the tuners (trouble), cutting out the pearl and inlaying my hummingbird maker's mark (trouble), sanding out all the little scorch marks left by the hot bearing on the router that cut the channels for the binding (trouble), putting on three coats of sealer and six coats of varnish (lotta trouble -- and I couldn't do it in the air conditioned house, because my wife gets migraines from the fumes), gluing on the bridge (scary trouble), fitting the 12 little boxwood bridge pins (easy, but tedious), fitting the saddle and nut, and filing 12 notches in the nut (trouble), setting and gluing in the neck (more scary trouble), and stringing it up. You never really know if the action and intonation are OK until you do this -- and it's the last step. I strung it late Saturday night. Then I had to file and recrown two frets (they were done in 2002) -- but other than that, it was fine.Today we are going to Roanoke to give it to him on his 40th birthday. He totally doesn't know it -- we cooked it up with his wife. She's taking him to a restaurant out of town, and (surprise) we'll be sitting in the restaurant. And sometime during dinner I'll remember that I had this out in the car. Basically, it's a Martin D-12-28 (it began with wood from their shop), only a lot more handmade.
updated by @razyn: 06/11/15 07:21:53AM
A simple dulcimer or scheitholt with a floating bridge?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
Thanks much Lisa. I'll check out Ben's site right now.
A simple dulcimer or scheitholt with a floating bridge?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
Yes indeed, a man after my own heart! ;DConsider Ben Seymour of North Carolina. Ben is not only reasonably priced (in my opinion), but he is very into the early scheitholt reproductions and will build you just about anything you desire. Here is his website's page of 'Scheitholtesque Beauties' .Ben made my wonderful cherry Galax dulcimer and I can't recommend him highly enough. Ben also happens to be a member here on FOTMD, here is Ben's Page here on this site.
A simple dulcimer or scheitholt with a floating bridge?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
I want to buy a simple but high-quality scheitholt or dulcimer with a floating bridge or saddle. (By which I mean a bridge or saddle that's held in place by string tension alone and that's not glued or pinned to the fretboard or soundboard. The term's usage seems variable, but that's what I mean.)I want a floating bridge so I can change string gauges freely without resorting to woodwork to restore intonation. I don't mind notching 2 or 3 bridges for different gauge ranges. The goal is to be able to experiment freely.Other things I'd like are:* Durability and a general a lack of finickiness other than that occasioned by the floating bridge.* Playability.* Decent sustain.* Nice, silvery sound when strung with, for example, three 0.010" strings.* Tight, somewhat restrained bass response when using a wound bass string. No need for a big, guitar-like bottom end (though it's not a deal-killer in an otherwise suitable instrument).* Trapezoidal scheitholt or teardrop shape.* Iron zither pins (preferably) or planetary tuners as opposed to wooden pegs or worm-gear tuners.* Metal frets, probably using fret wire, but stapled frets are OK too if they work well.* Simple, somewhat antique appearance. For example, round soundhole(s), no binding, purfling or bookmatching, no obvious modernity other than frets, tuners and finish.So far this looks fairly close to Karl Gotzmer's Americanized scheitholt .Are there others I should be considering? Should cost less than $500. Much less than $500 is certainly a plus. (Karl's scheitholt is around $200.)Thanks for looking this over.
updated by @flint-hill: 06/08/16 09:24:05PM
I would have liked to have been there as well but learned about it just too late. I have Warren's 100th burl Walnut hourglass book matched dulcimer. It has a lot of use on it but is very beautiful still. It plays well and sounds wonderful. I resisted putting geared tuners on it and I'm glad now that I did. The only ding is one near a sound hole made from a microphone dropping on it during a radio interview at WHAS many, many years ago. Other than that it is in perfect condition. I have several others that Warren built but this is by far my favorite.
It is too bad that this was not publicized more. I would have loved to have been there!~
updated by @teri-west: 02/15/16 10:22:03AM
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Wow! I'd love to see (and hear!) you play, Mike!
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Mike,
I'm curious about how you hold the dulcimer when bowing. Do you use a fiddle bow? Are you playing both fast and slow tunes?
I really like the sound of a mountain dulcimer that is bowed!
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Mike, the way you're holding it makes more sense to me (than with the fingers in the grooves).
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
I'd like to give one of those a try sometime, Mike, to hear how it sounds. With my coordination, though, I'm afraid it'd be like trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time.
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Mike,
If you have any photos of your bow or sound clips of you playing, I'd love to see them.
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Anybody bow in the fashion of Leah Smith, as seen in Jean Ritchie's THE DULCIMER BOOK, with the dulcimer propped on a table at its waist and the tail of the instrument on her lap? (10) In Gerry Milnes's PLAY OF A FIDDLE, he relates that Samuel Johnson was said to have played hymns with a bow, the dulcimer's headstock propped on a window sill. (139)Bowing a lap dulcimer and getting good sound is not easy. I do love the other-worldly sound got from a lap dulcimer being bowed.
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Richard Graham said:
I don't know about guitars, but....The old european bowl back mandolins fell out of favor in America once mandolins began to be used in american style stringbands around 1920 and on. As I myself have found, they are very difficult to hold still against your stomach or chest while standing to play, as in a stringband setting on a stage. They slide and tilt too much because of the round back, not that they fall (since they have a shoulder strap). Sitting with one in your lap was not as much of a problem.European dulcimer ancestors were more often played on a table. Americans seem to have developed a preference for playing the early american dulcimers in their laps. I have equal difficulty keeping hourglass, teardrop, and galax eliptical dulcimers on my lap while playing fast fiddle tunes- I need a strap. The 'balance' effect of mirrored bouts doesn't seem do a thing for me to keep the instrument stable on my lap to play, i'm afraid. I seldom strum in the strum hollow- I find further up to give the best 'bounce' and tone. Usually about at the halfway point between the bridge and wherever I am currently fretting. I do the same with banjo.Now having the fretboard in the middle of the instrument might indeed make it easier to play on the lap. It would also make it easier to bow I'd think, though weren't some of the european ancestors/relatives bowed on a table, such as the Langeliks?It will be interesting to me to see how this works itself out when I get my 'traditional' style epinette des vosges next Spring. I'll report back here if I can remember. :)Anyone remember those round back guitar from the 70's? They fell out of your lap like a drunken cheerleader at a frat party!
Berimbau
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Richard Graham said:
Hi Berimbau,Can you explain why you feel this is so?thanks!Again it's far easier to strum a faster tune on an Appalachian dulcimer than it would be on a sheitholdt or other earlier zither form Berimbau
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Richard Graham said:
... the bridges on most older dulcimers do not easily lend themselves to good bowing technique. Besides, the fiddle was already present throughout Appalachia, and was in fact already the premiere instrument of the region.I was mostly alluding to earlier forms of the dulcimer -- zitters and such -- that seem to have been used more for hymn singing than for hoedowns; and more by German-American radical sectarians than by either Anglo-Americans, or more mainstream Protestants of any ethnicity. There was some documentation of that tradition just as it was fading from the scene, perhaps about as late as WWI, but mostly in the 19th century. What little we have about it in the written record has been reviewed on various ED threads, especially by Greg Gunner (Banjimer, there).But even the links with German pietists, Mennonites etc. may be more apparent than real; the people who saw fit to write on this obscure topic (the bowing of diatonic zithers) were after all in Pennsylvania, and surrounded by those folks. If Henry Mercer had collected in the vicinity of Burkesville, KY or Red Boiling Springs, TN around 1910, he might have found Scotch-Irish hillbillies bowing dulcimers. And btw calling them Frog fiddles.Anyway, it was done here and there, in Appalachia and elsewhere, a few generations before Ken Bloom was on the scene. The need perceived by violinists and their sympathizers for "good bowing technique" is fairly irrelevant, if one is using a slack, homemade bow -- and letting one's drones be drones. So the flat bridge is OK, really. On an old TMB, it's built-in (the "bridge" is a piece of sheet metal bent over a nail, as is the nut). That didn't keep people from bowing a TMB.That's not quite the same as bowing a psalmodikon -- an instrument that normally has one string, and frets at every semitone (though it may also come with a set of diatonic transposing sticks, painted with the gapped scales for playing in several different modes). With one string, the top of the bridge can be flat, arched, concave, or whatever.Dick
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
razyn said:
Psalmodikons were also bowed, and still areHere's a clip of that (in Sweden, I think): http://www.stthuset.com/tidning/film/viavinga/psalmdiakon/index.htm I can read Swedish, but this clip is just a link -- and there's no caption, that I could see, telling where the group is playing. Some of the members of this organization are in Norway.Dick
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Diane said:
There are less than 100 of those floating around the US... Most of them seem to be below the Mason Dixon lineI just looked at the "About Ken" page on http://www.boweddulcimer.com/ and found this:"He has presented these programs at National battlefields, Living History sites, Highland Games, and schools all over North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky."Seems to be a correlation between seeing Ken Bloom and owning, or playing, a bowed dulcimer.I think there may be a great many more old dulcimers floating around that have been bowed, but not lately -- and we just don't know it.Those who bowed them a little deeper in the past than 1972 were not necessarily also violinists, or cellists; some bowed them noter-and-drone style, and some leaned them on a table with the head away from the seated player.Psalmodikons were also bowed, and still are -- mostly well to the north of the Mason-Dixon line, because that's where most of the Nordic population settled. http://www.psalmodikon.com/AnnualMeeting.html Just a little grist for the mill.Dick
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Hey, Diane, I hope you get the chance to bow a dulcimer this weekend! If you already fiddle and have some experience on cello, you'll take to a bowed dulcimer right away.Let me know, please, "if the stars align properly." ; )
Bowing a dulcimer
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Anybody here who bows a mountain dulcimer?Anybody here who has a dulcimer built especially to be bowed?I have a Ken Bloom bowed dulcimer and enjoy learning to play it. :-) Before I got my bowed dulcimer, though, I was holding a mountain dulcimer the way one holds a bowed dulcimer (upright, with bout steadied at the knees) and bowing it. Through time, folks who have bowed mountain dulcimers have held them in who knows how many different ways? Or, if set on a table, didn't hold them at all.So, one and all, I'm curious to learn of the adventures of others with bowing a dulcimer of any kind. . .
updated by @robin-thompson: 04/07/25 06:27:44PM
Who made this dulcimer?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
I think you've got it -- the one in this latest eBay ad has the scroll knocked off, and it's probably a lower-end model, but many of the details are right.Mako guitars are mostly Japanese knockoffs of Gibson and Fender electrics, last made in the early 80s. Label looks like the same Mako, to me. That's OK by me; my son speaks Japanese, and when his buddy comes over again to buy his next American guitar, they can show him their Japanese dulcimer.
Who made this dulcimer?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
Where was the antique store, and do you still have it? I don't remember seeing a name in the one I bought in Oregon (also at an antique store) -- don't think it was all that antique, but that's where it was. I didn't hang onto it very long, but I still have visiting rights.
Who made this dulcimer?
Instruments- discuss specific features, luthiers, instrument problems & questions
I posted this spruce and rosewood dulcimer in the Photos area 2-3 days ago -- also brought it to the attention of the Dulcimer Making group -- but haven't yet had a nibble.The "Photos" listing has a long comment, if anybody bothered to click on it. I guess I'll paste that in, too. The photo ID of Lisa(1 or 2) is not the name of the instrument, but of my daughter-in-law in CA, who owns it. Anyway, I just figured out how to post a picture, as distinguished from a Photobucket url, within the text of a message. (Click on the little camera... duh.) So I'm doing that.
updated by @razyn: 06/08/16 09:24:05PM
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
There's a French Epinette site that has lots of pictures. http://epinette.free.fr/ The "epinette on top an hourglass" style is fairly common. My friend Michael King, in England, makes both the hourglass and the common "zither" shaped epinettes.
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Foggers said:
Unfortunately Deborah is 500 miles away from my place in Montreal. The next time we get together, I'll make a recording of her playing. I wish I'd done so already!MichaelThanks for the info Michael - now can you obtain a recording of her playing it???!!!???
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Michael Vickey said:
Wow, so that's like about the same size as a regular mountain dulcimer! Pretty big.The Epinette des Vosges I am having made for me will have a scale length of somewhere around 19". =8-oI imagine the two instruments will sound very different from each other!Deborah measured the VSL - 27 inches.
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Thanks for the info Michael - now can you obtain a recording of her playing it???!!!???
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Strumelia said:
Lisa,Deborah measured the VSL - 27 inches.MichaelWow, what an instrument! And 8 strings, too.
Do you know what its scale length is?
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
Strumelia said:
Yes that is what I thought - other pics I have seen of old epinettes look just like the upper part of this instrument - like on these links posted by Patrmigan in the "Ancestor of the Dulcimer" group http://mountaindulcimer.ning.com/group/dulcimerancestors/forum/topics/epinette-des-vosges-france Maybe the luthier was curious about inter-breeding?? It is beautiful and that double sound box arrangement must give it a very special voice.I find this interesting- the way it has the effect of two soundboxes. It's almost like an epinette on top, mating with a mountain dulcimer! =8-o I've never seen pix of an epinette des V. with an hourglass shape before. I'm guessing it's an innovation/experiment by the luthier, but i might be wrong about that.
In any case, it's pretty amazing!
Epinette des Vosges
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
I find this interesting- the way it has the effect of two soundboxes. It's almost like an epinette on top, mating with a mountain dulcimer! =8-o I've never seen pix of an epinette des V. with an hourglass shape before. I'm guessing it's an innovation/experiment by the luthier, but i might be wrong about that.In any case, it's pretty amazing!