Dulcimer lesson, 7/21/09

In response to an E-mail from Cindy, I wrote this description of my most recent lesson. I copied Tina on it, since I thought she might like to read it too.


I had my most recent lesson with Tina Tuesday evening. I thought it was an excellent lesson. We've been focusing on two main things: exercises and Ash Grove.

The main exercise is the one she calls the "walking exercise". You start on the main D, below the middle of the dulcimer on the right side of the treble bridge. Play that note very quietly with the right hand, then play the next note up (E) with your left hand a bit louder, and so on up the right side of the treble bridge until you get to E an octave and a note higher than you started. Then you come back down, getting quieter again until you're back to the original D as softly as you can play it. Then you start up again, but use only your right hand. After you get back down, you do both hands again, and then do your left hand.

Last lesson, she introduced an excercise for jig rhythms. It's very simple. Pick a string and play with your right hand on one side of the treble bridge and your left hand on the other side. Just alternate hands, but play in an exaggerated 6/8 time. LOUD quiet quiet LOUD quiet quiet. But the LOUDs alternate hands, of course. It sounds easy, but it's not!

This lesson, she introduced an exercise she invented that she calls "arepeggio scale". It starts at a low G on the bass bridge, played with the right hand. Then, staying on the bass bridge, play B and D, and then play G on the treble bridge with the left. Again, you start quietly and build up to as loud as possible. The next time through, you play B-D-G-A, and then B-D-G-B, and continue that way until the top note has gotten all the way up the G scale. Then you come back down. In addition to keeping good tone (which I'll talk about in a moment), this exercise also works to relax your whole body. You end up swaying from side to side, hopefully very relaxed. The relaxation and flow of your body flows directly into the music you are playing.

You can do this exercise starting with the left hand as well. In that case, instead of playing the D on the bass bridge, you play it on the treble bridge, as you'd expect. But you are playing thetop notes with your right hand, and after you've worked your way up to C, you have to cross to the left side of the treble bridge to get the D with your right hand. That brings body movement even more into the picture.

Tina is very much into dynamics. Even a begnning dulcimer player can do a lot with dynamics. The challenge I'm working on now is to play loudly but maintain good tone. If I force the hammers down, I get loud, all right, but my tone gets bad. It's sounds like a "whack", Tina says, and I can definitely hear it. Tina is trying to get me to just let the hammer fall as it wants to. Volume is controlled by how high the hammer is before the downstroke. In the arpeggio exercise, she is trying to get me to raise the hammers as high as I can -- even up to the level of my nose!

A corollary of this is that after you play a note, the hammer should be very close to the strings. The softest notes are then played by letting the hammer fall a quarter of an inch. She saw that my "neutral position", as she called it, was about two inches above the strings. That would make it very difficult to play softly, since you have to control the descent of the hammer from high instead of just letting it fall from low.

At one point, I said that hammers can be raised by fingers, wrists or elbows, and that I am struggling to find my balance among them. I asked how much of each she uses. She said she uses wrists and elbows exclusively, and leads with the wrists. I said that's exactly opposite of the way Karen plays, and Tina said she could tell from the recordings Karen sent her.

This discussion of wrists and elbows leads into the most challenging thing Tina is trying to teach me (at least, I think it is). She is trying to get me to draw the notes out of the dulcimer. This is a technique that tympani players use. After the hammer strikes the strings, it should feel as though you are pulling a thread up along with it. The elbow moves up, but the wrist sort of comes along reluctantly. It seems strange that a technique that is used after the note is played should matter, but it makes a very big difference. At one point, she had me doing the walking exercise and focusing on this technique. When I played one note near the top of the run, she said "Good!" I replied, "That felt good!" That one note just felt right when I played it. It was almost perfectly effortless.

I'm struggling with posture. I tend to stand a bit too far away from the dulcimer, and end up leaning forward slightly as I play. I should stand straight, but with my knees unlocked and my feet spread shoulder-width apart. Tina wants to me to move in so that when I hold my hammers over the middle of the dulcimer, my elbows are in line with the side seams of my pants. But when I do that, it feels that the low notes are too close to my body.

Tina also thought that my stand might be sticking out too far in front of my dulcimer. I have a scissors stand that holds the dulcimer too high and too flat for my taste. So, I cut the strings holding the front and back pieces and replaced them with longer ones. My dulcimer rests on the back point and on the strings about six inches back from the front pieces of the stand. When she plays my dulcimer, they don't actually get in her way, but she knows they're there, and she doesn't feel quite as free to move as she likes to be. She thinks that may affect me, too. I'm going to pull out my old, heavy, unbelievably ugly homemade adjustable stand and see if I can find a better position using it.

The only song we've been working on has been Ash Grove. I told you about the first time I played it for her, with the embellishments I had put in but almost no dynamics. She had me focus solely on the melody, and putting all my creativity into the dynamics of the piece. In my last lesson two weeks ago, she told me to start putting some chords back into it, and assigned me to come back and "blow her socks off" with Ash Grove. I hadn't practiced nearly as much as I should, so I didn't feel ready to really impress her, but I put a bit of fanciness into it, and she said it was definitely improving.

At one point a week or so ago, I started playing around with Lord of the Dance. I found that I was leaving most of the melody to the left hand and using the right almost exclusively for harmony. I hadn't planned it; it just ended up that way. I demonstrated a little bit, but I hadn't played that song since then. She said it wasn't really true hand separation that I was doing. Then, she gave me yet another exercise to work on a lead pattern for 4/4 songs. This is the simplest one yet, just picking a lead hand and playing on the beats loudly with one hand and softly on the half-beats with the other hand: RlRlRlRl. Then, leave out the other hand on beats one and three: R RlR Rl . (Those are small Ls.) Then, she told me to work on Lord of the Dance, but only the melody, and keeping to whichever lead pattern I choose, so that one hand is always used to play on the beats and the other is played on the half-beat when necessary.


Tina replied:

Rob-how nice to read such a thorough description of the things we've been working on. Mostly you're spot on, but there is one important thing you missed in the lead pattern exercise I gave you--only the strong beats-1 & 3-are played with big upstrokes and everything around it is de-emphasized. This means that if you have a measure of 8 eighth notes, only two of them are strong. This helps the music have more space-kind of like the difference between a rabbit hopping and a dolphin arcing out of the water of over and over. The rabbit hops quickly with not much space between hops, the dolphin clears some air. This feeling of space is a big part of playing music effectively, in my opinion. Here's my re-write of what you had: Rlrl Rlrl or BIG tiny tiny tiny BIG tiny tiny tiny. The counting is just ONE and 2 and THREE and 4 and. The second one is R, rl R, rl or BIG tiny tiny Big tiny tiny, counting ONE, two and THREE four and. The BIG and tiny refer to how high you're lifting your hammer.