How to Play Tunes on the Hammered Dulcimer

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Tim Van Egmond here on behalf of expertvillage.com and I am here to talk about the hammered dulcimer. You can find out more about me at www.timvanegmond.com. What I would like to talk about now is the process of learning a tune. Either whether you are learning it from music or learning it by ear, you need to find the most efficient and easy striking pattern. You have choices because notes are repeated in different sections of the instruments so you want to find the way that happens the most smoothly and it’s the most accessible to one part of the tune going into another. I am going to start with talking about reels which are dance tunes that are in a 4/4 rhythm. It helped me a great deal to learn a technique from Ken ___ who was a wonderful hammered dulcimer player and teacher in Baltimore, Maryland and he calls it the left hand lead which is a way of playing that on the down beat of every note as you are going through the melody in other words. On the downbeats; the 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. The counted notes would be the ones that you would use your left hand for and then upbeats like 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 would be your right hand. This not only makes it consistent and possible to put a pulse into your playing where you can emphasize the downbeats but it also frees up your right hand from the basic part of the melody to put in ornamentation's whether they are cords or base notes or things like that. So for instance if I took the first part of the real ___ from home, I would start from the left hand. I hope that demonstrates clearly enough the down beat is the left hand and the b part would go. So you see how the right hand is free to put in those space notes as the left hand is play8ing the downbeats. "