Hammered Dulcimer Flam Technique

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Tim Van Egmond here on behalf of expertvillage.com. I am here to talk about the hammered dulcimer and the care, feeding and playing of it. You can find out more about me at www.timvanegmond.com. In the jig that I played on another segment, Ethel Highlander, there were some decorations that I put in. Some of them were fairly simple where I put in a harmony note at the ends of phrases; that sort of things. There was simple else that involved a technique that is known by a percussionist, a drummer and dulcimer’s players use this technique too. It is called a flam and that is where you strike the string but maintains some pressure on the handle so that you get a rapid repeating and sometimes that might be a harmony note leading into the harmony note so you would have it just ahead of the beat. In some cases, this is called a valley rule where you would go from the treble onto the base or the base onto the treble. One way or other where you are moving as your hammer is bouncing from one string to another and its called a valley role because you have a way that the strings from the treble go down beneath the top of the base bridge and the base bridge goes below the treble bridge so the strings cross and make a valley. So when you do a valley role you would be going and you might put in a left hand high note to go into that. It might be at the end or the beginning or in the case of Ethel Highlander's was going from the right side of the bridge onto the left with my right hand. So I was going. Another place I would like to put that in a jig called Morrisons. "