Saturday, January 10, 2009

My new hammered dulcimer debuts

We (that is, Cabin Fever! - Fred, Woody, me) played for the Columbia contra dance tonight. It was the first time that this hammer dulcimer was played publicly. A couple of weeks ago, Beth and I drove up to Black Mountain with it to have a microphone (actually two of them - treble and bass) installed. Although I had verified at home that I knew how the hammered dulcimer's internal mics should be hooked up to a sound system, we were unable to get it work at the dance and we had to use an external mic instead. We suspect a weak battery in the pre-amplifier.

An unexpected plus for the internal mics concerns tuning. This afternoon I connected the hammered dulcimer's mics to my Seiko tuner. That made tuning a lot quicker and better. The dulcimer is a 16-15 Masterworks, so that is 62 strings and 94 tunings! Quicker and better tuning is much appreciated!

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