For all my life, I've loved music. In my early years I'd fooled around with the piano. My family had a piano since the time I was about 7 years old and I was fascinated with it. I worked my way through a couple of the John Thompson piano study books, [+]For all my life, I've loved music. In my early years I'd fooled around with the piano. My family had a piano since the time I was about 7 years old and I was fascinated with it. I worked my way through a couple of the John Thompson piano study books, and got a lot of "easy piano" sheet music and personality collections to work on. However, I only took formal piano lessons for less than a year when I was nineteen.
I'd learned enough piano to be able to hack out a few pieces of music, enough to impress my friends and no one else, but I'd never really got to the point where I could be very expressive on it. I gave up the lessons for lack of time to practice once I was in college.
While I was studying for a mechanical engineering degree, my brother Dave bought a dulcimer at a craft fair. It was during 1977 and the dulcimer had been painted red white and blue in a bicentennial motif, with star shaped sound holes and everything. I guess he got a good deal on it. It was actually a pretty good instrument, however, made by Jerry Beale of Marne, OH, which is only five or six miles from my current home. (Mr. Beale is now retired.)
I played around on it a bit, and was enchanted by its sound and simplicity, but I felt I was too busy to take on a project like learning a new musical instrument at that point in my life. However, maybe a year later I saw a dulcimer kit for sale at another crafts show, and I bought it.
Over the next year or more, in between classes and exams, I did a really bad job of building that dulcimer. To give you some idea, there was a part of the fret board near the "one" fret that for whatever reason I was having trouble getting sanded smooth. I was determined, however, and kept working on it. This, of course, gave me a fret board with, in effect, two strum hollows, one at each end of the fret board. I had to sort of pry up the first fret so that it bowed up over the wood, so that the string wouldn't buzz. (It also had a REAL strange fret pattern to begin with.) I was blissfully unaware of its shortcommings, though, so I dove in and started to play. When it didn't sound quite right, I assumed I needed more practice.
It was several years after I finished that first dulcimer that you might say I started playing "seriously." 1983 is when I
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