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How Do You Identify Yourself?
When you introduce yourself, what do you say? In other words, after you tell them your name, what do you say to describe yourself? Most of us identify ourselves according to our occupation. For the past 3 years, I’ve been saying, “I’m Linda Ratcliff, and I'm the sales manager for a senior community.” This has been on my mind lately, because I’m just a few short months away from retiring again, and people are asking what I’m going to do next.
My daughter asked this question yesterday, and I resp…
What to Do When You Want to Give Up
Remember learning to ride a bike? How many times did you fall off before you got the hang of it? And even after you learned, there were probably occasional mishaps – but I bet you got back on and tried again.
Pursuing diet and fitness goals is a lot like that. From time to time you'll fail. I have. Many times. It takes time to shop for the right food and then cook it, and more time to exercise, and often I can’t (won’t?) make the time. I have a sugar addiction, so I crave sweets all the time. M…
Did You Know?
Did you know?
DulcimerCrossing is not just a weekly newsletter
DulcimerCrossing is not just weekly Livestreams
DulcimerCrossing is not just a collection of Habits for Your Healthy Music Habitat, tips from teachers across the folk music world
DulcimerCrossing is not monthly Live Workshops
DulcimerCrossing is not just a sponsor of on-line festivals like the Berkeley Dulcimer Gathering, QuaranTUNE Dulcimer Festival, Chromatic Dulcimer Day, Resonator Dulcimer Day
DulcimerC…
Returning to Jam: New Survival Tips
Returning to Jam!
Survival Tips from DJ Hamouris, our Baritone and Standard Mountain Dulcimer Instructor
by Deborah (DJ) Hamouris
After such a long social isolation, I was excited to join nightly jams at an in-person dulcimer camp this summer!
What I had *not* counted on was how much it would hurt to continuously strum for a couple of hours. Though I teach & play a lot, most of what I do is less strumming & more picking.
But my advancing arthritis in fingers & hands changed how I felt abo…
Enhanced Audio Playback Feature
We are excited to announce the enhancement of the Playback feature for all the mp3 files in DulcimerCrossing: in the Backing Tracks Library and in the Lessons in the Courses.
There has always been the ability to increase the speed of the track, and if you click through the 1x symbol on the playback track it will scroll to faster speeds,
until it scrolls to .5x (or half speed) which was the ONLY slower speed available. Our request to enhance this feature has been honored and implemented!
T…
Colin Beasley Live Workshop
We are excited to host Colin Beasley for our May Live Workshop!
Colin Beasley (<-- Click on his name to learn more about him)
Thurs, May 19, 5 pm MDT
Playing Melody and Harmony Together:
Hand Independence
This is a hammered dulcimer-focused workshop (with mountain dulcimer translation!)
This workshop (and its recorded…
Certificates of Completion
New DulcimerCrossing Feature:
Certificates Awarded for Completion of Courses!
We are excited to provide a celebration of your accomplishments when you complete
(and mark as complete) each one of our over 200 Courses on DulcimerCrossing.
The Certificates look like this:
We all know that a significant challenge for us as learners is to stay with the learning process and every bit of support we can get will help us reach our goal of:
"Bridging the Gap between what you know and where…
New Feature: Sample Lessons
NEW FEATURE: Sample Lessons
We've added a new feature on our DulcimerCrossing.com website: Sample Lessons by several of our instructors for each of the instruments for which we teach Courses.
Mountain Dulcimer:
These are sample mountain dulcimer lessons from DulcimerCrossing's curriculum, one from each level we teach:
Absolute Beginning-Level 1-Steve Eulberg
Beyond Beginning-Level 2-Butch Ross
Intermediate-Level 3-Neal Hellman
Advanced-Level 4-Nina Zanetti
…Introducing Carmen Amrein a new Teacher at DulcimerCrossing.
Our newest Teacher to join the faculty of DulcimerCrossing is Carmen Amrein who lives in Munich, Germany.
Carmen was able to study the playing of the German Hackbrett, the 5th-tuned German Hackbrett (in flat keys to accompany accordions and folk music, and the Italian Salterio at the University in Munich. She and other graduate have put together the annual Hackbrett Festival (the 3rd version of that festival is coming up in May.)
We are excited that she offered a Live Workshop for us in Mar…
New Blues Backing Tracks added to the Library
I am excited to the announce the addition of SIX (6) brand-new Blues backing tracks in 6 different keys. These are all played at 117 bpm (beats per minute). The tracks were created with guitar, dulci-Bro and drumkit and are located in our Backing Tracks Library
All levels of membership have access to this library and can download the tracks as well as the PDF chord charts that accompany them.
Making use of the Pentatonic Minor Scales for each key and/or the Blues Scales for each key, players…
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