Hammered Dulcimer Tablature Examples-B

Now, let's look at Lucille Riley. Hers, in contrast, is very spare and very notation dependent. She is, and it's true many hammered elsewhere players are able to read music and don't have a problem with that, and so what she is doing is doing the same thing that Linda Lyle Thompson did, and have the stems up for the melody note, and the stems down for harmony notes. And you can see here in the first measure there's one stem up for the sweet hour of prayer, and the next there are, you know, sweet hour of prayer. Everything there's some that's a melody has a stem going up, and then there's some chord notes that happen at the same time that the melody note plays.

Their stems go down. She has a bracket here that links these at the same time, and your choice would be to use 1, and in order to play a rolled chord, you could play the melody note with your left hammer, and your right hammer is going to come to the right and sweep and get the other two notes, or your left hammer could play the first the top of the stems down notes, and bounce up and play the f sharp. It's probably easier to do the sweep to the right than the other way, but that's one way to get 3 notes playing at the same time. So doing this. Playing the stem up note with the left hammer and the right hammer is sweeping from the d to the a.

You'll notice below the the musical notation are some left and right designations. Lucille describes herself as a right hand lead player, and says, but there are times when I start with my left hand because it works out a hammering pattern better. So she's assuming that most things are going to be with the right hand lead, and then the other notes are going to come as you add the other hammering patterns are going to come as you as you need them, so that you don't get stuck. She's also using the roman numerals above to show different places in the hammered dulcimer to play. If you are trying to understand someone's tablet, you're always looking at the front part of their book because they will describe their system.

So the and, if the if you're in the middle of it and you say I remember all this but there's this weird thing, go back to the beginning and see see if there's a key that will, okay, this didn't show up in any of those other songs, but now I really need to know what they meant by that little piece of notation. Now we have one more we're going to take a look at, and this one is by Alice Freeman. She comes to the hammered dulcimer as a harp player first, and, she also has a hammered dulcimer with an extended range. So the first thing we're going to look at is she has a key that she uses, and this will be in the in the supplemental content. We used with her permission that she has designated everything on all all the notes with a zero sign for the for the lowest octave, a nothing adding nothing to the letter of the note for the next octave, adding ones for the next octave, 2 for the next, 3 for the next, and 4 for the next.

Now she does a common thing, or or her way of doing the tablature similar to some of the other ones we've seen. If it's something that's playing on the bass bridge, she underlines that note. If it's something on the right side of the treble bridge, she leaves there's no lines above or below. On the, but she uses an upper case for right and left. When you get to the notes of the left side of the treble bridge, she uses lowercase letters, and that's how we know this the left side of the treble bridge.

And when you get to the extended bridge at the very top, she has an XR or an XL to tell you it's extended. In a similar way, when she's playing the low bass notes on the super bass bridge, she has 3 in this particular grouping. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 on mine, and some have more. She uses an upper case to show you that it's the lower octave, but also an x for the XR and XL, which tells you it's there. So now let's look at an example of her tablature.

This is for Red Haired Boy, the Irish tune. If you look at this, she has musical notation similar that we've seen in other places. The a in the box delineates the a section of the tune, the b in the box talks about the b section of the tune. All the numbers that are circled to the left are measure numbers, so you don't get those confused with anything else. Above the notes that are being played, each time the note shows up for the first time she gives you what note it is, and where you might be able to find that if you're looking confused on your your your hammered ultimate chart.

Below it she gives a hammering pattern that she suggests, and the upper case with nothing below or above tells us we're on the right side of the treble bridge. Then she has some lower case rights and lefts, which puts us on the left side of the treble bridge. If she would have in this particular song any notes on the bass bridge, you would see them with an an underline under the r or the l. So there you have several different ways that hammered also players have sought to remind and remember how they found the way they wanna play the tune, and convey that to each other on paper. I hope that's helpful for you.

Some of you might say, you know, that tablature thing's not helpful at all. Well, I'm one of those people, and what I did is, I would look at everybody's tablature, but it didn't really help me play. And so I made some little stamps that looked like the bridge of the hammered dulcimer, and I put dots. I played here and here, and all I need was a reminder of, oh, yeah, yeah, that was those dots. And I put a stamp on my music, and I had to make it small enough I could see what was going on.

But it it was a way to help me remember. Eventually all of these things are not needed as you're playing because you'll become comfortable with your instrument, and you will know where to look for things. But I think what's really helpful is that you'll when you're playing other people's arrangements, you get out of the stuck box that you can get into saying, well, here's my d. I have I have students who come in and I'll say, now, I'm playing the d and the e over here. And so they immediately look at the music and see a d and an e and they because they're used to them being here, this is the only place they're gonna play them.

And I'll say, I played the d and e over here because I was in a lot in the g box and that made more sense. And they'd say, oh, that makes sense. The next time they come back for their lesson, they're playing their d and e here because when they look, they got used to seeing d and e in only one place. So that's the benefit of playing the way someone else arranged it. You can expand your horizons and begin to see, I might have been limited the way I was playing before.

This might be an easier way to do it. I don't when you're doing the jumping below your heart rate goes up and and, it it can cause you anxiety, and you're less accurate when you're anxious. So my encouragement is there might be somebody that comes out with a new kind of tablature. Maybe you're the person who's gonna come out with the one that ends up being the standard, but try to understand what's going on, try to make sense of it. And, if you have that excellent example that's the best, well, feel free to send it to us, and and, we'll we'll add it to our compendium.

But that's hammered dulcimer retablature in the various ways that we have at this particular point. We'll see you next time at Dulcimer Crossing.

Intro to Computer Software and Dulcimer Notation

Course Content

Overview

Hammered Dulcimer Tablature Examples-B

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