Lisa it is something how simply complicated things may feel when our lovely instrument is all new to us. Yes this easy fix will help someone, I just worked it out on my Thomas replica the other day. A-HAA! 

Lisa, you can enjoy playing one of these old-timey, single-peg dulcimers yourself.  I know a guy...

Lisa, or just push the string through 'til you can grab it and pull it all the way out.  If there's any "life" left in the string, I like to keep it around if it's long enough to go back on in a pinch.

 

Though I've never actually owned a vintage or antique dulcimer myself, when I first saw one of these beautiful old single peg tail ends, I thought to myself:  

Wow, that's cool, but....it would be such a huge PAIN to change a string-  if you needed to change the string at the bottom of the stack there, you'd have to loosen and remove all the other strings on top of it first, to take it off the peg...then replace the string and pile them all back on again.

It didn't occur to me that I was being really, really dense.   

Suddenly the light went on in my head and I realized that if I had to change one of the strings that wasn't 'on top' of the loops stacked on the peg, all i'd need to do was take a little wire snipper and CUT that particular string loop where it looped around the peg, and then just pull it out to extract it from the pile without disturbing the other string loops on the peg.  Then I just put a new string on and its loop will then be on the top of the stack.

D U H .    

Yeah, seems like a no brainer in retrospect, but as a beginner it honestly didn't occur to me at first.  Who knows, maybe I'll save somebody from actually taking off all their strings in order to replace just one string!   

--
Site Owner

Those irritated by grain of sand best avoid beach.
-Strumelia proverb c.1990
updated by @strumelia: 06/13/16 09:20:39PM

This may seem like an obvious tip to some folks, but honestly I had an "aha! moment" years ago when I figured it out.  So I thought I'd share it in case it saves someone else some effort some day.

You know how most modern dulcimers have a separate little pin or hole- one for each string to end on at their tail piece area?  Sort of like this or a similar arrangement:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, many older or vintage dulcimers ( and some of today's wonderful reproductions of old dulcimers) have instead a single peg, knob, or dowel at the tail end where all the strings loop over, one on top of the other, something like this arrangement:

 

--
Site Owner

Those irritated by grain of sand best avoid beach.
-Strumelia proverb c.1990
updated by @strumelia: 10/27/19 12:02:25PM