Shootrj, if you've ever starting singing a song and found it too high or too low for your voice, and started over to sing it a little higher or lower to be more comfortable, then... what you actually did was change the key you were singing in.
That is all that really matters @shootrj2003! Luckily if you ever do want to know more (and believe me it took me a fair bit to grasp keys at all) there are some really well informed folks around here who like to help.
A quick follow up about this post, I was very new at the time and would often just pluck around the melody string until i heard what sounded like the first two notes, and then just figure the rest out through trial and error. This resulted in me sometimes starting my songs on the 3rd fret, and then figuring out the entire melody in the key of G. I had a vague understanding that the 6 or 6+ frets are just two different 'types' of the key of D or different modes.This made me very confused because technically the notes I was using were all in 'D mixolydian.' The big problem with this was that the drones didnt harmonize with the melody. A simple fix would have been to just move the whole melody down three frets, but I was really underinformed at the time, so instead i just added chords to the entire arrangement in what I now know was the key of G. Big pain in the butt, but Ive since fond that the key of G is common at jams so at least it wasn't for nothing.
Nate
I’m really new to music,and not really sure what a key is,but I play on happily in ignorance!
Nate, as Ken and Skip have explained, the notion of key on a modal instrument gets a little tricky.
I would just define a key as the tonal center of a piece of music, the tone that seems to represent rest or resolution with the other notes creating different degrees of tension.
Your effort to determine key by examining the sharps and flats of a piece makes sense in western classical music, and you are correct that the key of D major has a C# and they key of G has a C natural. That "key signature" defines the major scale, or the Ionian mode. However, with traditional, modal music, any mode can be played in any key, so the key, or tonal center, does not necessarily determine the scale pattern. To use the most common examples, D Ionian uses the C sharp, but D Mixolydian uses the C natural.
In fact, those examples explain why the 6+ fret was added. On a true diatonic dulcimer tuned to D, tuning DAd would not give you a major scale (Ionian mode) precisely because the 6 fret is a C natural. To play the major scale, one would tune DAA and start the scale at the 3rd fret. Then you get the C# on the 9th fret. To avoid having to retune, dulcimer players about a half century ago began adding the 6+ fret so that they could play in the two most common major-sounding modes, the Ionian and Mixolydian, without re-tuning.
Let's also remember that a lot of folk and pop music doesn't use all the notes of the scale or mode. A lot of music is pentatonic, meaning only 5 notes are used. And heck, the old song by the Chrystals, "Da Doo Ron Ron," only has three notes in it!
"So what?" you might ask. Good question. My point is that every song has a key, meaning the tonal center or "home base" even if it does not make use of the scale indicated by the key signature.
Having said all this, I would guess that 90 percent of the time when you are tuned DAA or DAd you are playing in the key of D (or Bm, the "relative minor"). If you fret across all the strings, then you can also play in G and perhaps (though it gets tricky) A. I've recently been arranging several tunes that work in both D and G on the DAd dulcimer. That way you can modulate after a couple of verses and impress your friends and family.
I learned several years ago that it is much easier to understand music theory, as applied to MD, when the word 'key' [in music] has several definitions. One defines or indicates the specific notes in a scale [the one you found], another, more generic, refers to the lowest note in a scale, regardless of the notes involved. The second one can also be a 'keynote' or 'scale center'.
So, in your tune, the written 'key' scale [def 1] is G; the 'key' on the instrument [def 2] is D.
The 6+ can be considered an additional fretboard overlay that modifies the mode layout of the frets. Two fret board layouts, 1 without the 6+, one without the 6.
Normally, "the key I'm in" is the open note of the Bass string. That is, the entire instrument is tuned to a particular keynote -- C, D, G, whatever.
The + frets are not there to supply notes -- not just sharps or flats -- above and beyond the diatonic scale. The 6+ fret in particular was added to the fretboard because people wanted to be able to play a C natural as well as the C# which is 'natural' to that diatonic scale.
When I first learned all this we talked about Modes, and the idea that players wanted to be able to play in more than one Mode with re-tuning. DAA (a.k.a. Ionian Mode) is what guitar folks think of as the Natural Major Scale. DAd (a.k.a. Mixolydian Mode) is almost the same -- except that the 7th note of the scale is "flatted" (a half step below what it would be in the Natural Major scale). The 6+ fret was added so that players could play both the natural and the flatted 7th note of a scale starting on the Open fret.
Years ago I wrote the attached article about modes (scales) and the diatonic nature of the dulcimer. It might help you understand things...
Hey guys I have been trying to practice writing my own tab and I wrote out tab by ear for an old folk song called sally wheatley. Because I did it by ear, and I'm still just beginning to learn music theory, I didnt really know what key I was in. because I didnt use any half frets my first thought was that I was in the key of D, but I noticed the key of D has a C sharp, and my arrangement has a C natural, so I think this means it is in the key of G? This seems weird to me because I assumed that since the dulcimer is diatonic, that the non half frets would be the diatonic scale, but if C# is in the scale of D, why is it the 6 1/2 fret? whereas C natural is the 6 fret. Would love some help this stuff is not very intuitive to me !
