Handmade dulcimers, books, music, and online instruction brought to you from Athens County in rural Southeast Ohio.

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MySpace

DulciTheory

• Home of the DulciTheory Newsletter
• DulciTheory On The Web
• Blogs: DulciMusings, and Modal-Improv

Events Calendar

• 2007 Events Calendar: Concerts, workshops, classes

JCR Recordings

• Favorite American Folktunes
• Blackbird & Beggarman

JCR Book Catalog

• Music Theory &
  Chord Reference
• Beginners Tunebook
• Dulcimer Solos 2
• Blackbird & Beggarman
• Dulcimer Solos I

Handmade Mountain Dulcimers

• North Carolina Hourglass
• Large Hourglass
• Hollowbody Electric
• The Yam
• Teardrop
• Rockwell's FAQ
• On Buying a Dulcimer

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J.C. Rockwell Music
PO Box 79
Guysville, OH 45735
Phone/Voicemail:
740-662-3011
email: jcrdulci - the "at sign" - verizon.net (no spaces or hyphens)

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About the Artist

• Jerry C. Rockwell Bio
• JCR Bibliography and Discography

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Articles

• Getting in tune:
  four ways
• Improvisation
• Arranging for dulcimer
• Chordal Explorations
  in D-A-D
• For Music Teachers

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Jerry Rockwell's
Mountain Dulcimer Page

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Find out about new dulcimers as they are created....Keep up with late-breaking news on my upcoming dulcimer performances and workshops.....Be the first person in your area to check out the wild and zany iMixes I'll be publishing on the iTunes Music Store:

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Fort New Salem
Dulcimer Weekend!

I'll be giving three dulcimer workshops at this fabulous festival on August 8, 9, and 10. Linda Sigismondi does an incredible job of organizing all the workshops, and the line-up this year is one of the best ever. Check it out for yourself, and maybe we'll see you there:

Fort New Salem Dulcimer Weekend

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House Concert at The Sprouted Acorn in Charm, Ohio!

On Saturday, June 14th, I did a house concert at The Sprouted Acorn in Charm, Ohio. This has to one of the classiest and most professional house concert series anywheres!.....ever! It is in a very secluded, beautiful setting amongst the rolling hills of Northeast Ohio. Thanks SO MUCH to Toby and Denice for an incredibly enjoyable evening! Make sure to check back with their great blog (in the link above, or below) to see who they have coming up --- I'm going to make it a point to attend one of their upcoming shows myself.

http://www.sproutedacorn.blogspot.com/

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Thanks!

To everyone who came to the workshops and concerts that Stephen Seifert and I did in Ohio over the last few weeks, and to everyone who spread the word and helped us organize the venues; Stephen and I would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts! We really had a blast, and we're already starting to plan for the next adventure, perhaps one year in the future - May 2009. When we have our itinerary sketched in, we will try and get it up here well in advance.

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Blackbird & Beggarman Now Available On iTunes!

Thanks to the wonderful folks at tunecore.com, my CD from 1994, entitled The Blackbird & The Beggarman is now available at iTunes. Click on the link to the iTunes Music Store below, and you will be taken directly to my CD (you probably have to have the free iTunes software installed before this link will work).

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DulciTheory Revived!

Here is the link to my Google Group on Music Theory as it applies to the mountain dulcimer:

http://groups.google.com/group/dulcitheory

The format will be a discussion group this time, instead of an email newsletter like we published last time around. I'm hoping we can have some lively interchanges and help you to get more music out of your instrument, and to enjoy your dulcimer playing to the max.

I hope you will be able to join us, but in the meantime, here is a duet of electric dulcimers that I recorded recently. It's kind of a fantasia on Drunken Sailor. I'm playing in E Dorian out of open D-A-D, and the chords are just Em, D, and A7.

rs3_dorian_duet1a_011908.mp3

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A New Dulcimer In Stock!

We just made a new page in the dulcimer catalog. It is dedicated to dulcimers actually in stock and available for sale. In the past it has been very difficult for me to build up any stock, but this year I'm going to make an effort to change that. Here is the new page:

New In The Shop

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Special Holiday Issue of

DulciTheory

I've been working with a really nice B minor chord progression lately that has turned into a sort of Build Your Own Waltz Construction Kit, so I thought I'd spread some holiday cheer by sharing some of my arpeggio studies with you.

First up, here is the 8 measure progression:

Bm /  /  |/  /  /  |D  /  /  |/  /  /  |

G  /  /  |D  /  /  |A7 /  /  |/  /  /  ||

Three Arpeggio Studies

I recorded short mp3 files of three studies using ONLY chord tones, and I played them with a flatpick on a 3-string North Carolina Hourglass in D-A-D. The basic idea in all three studies is to realize the full potential of the first 3 frets. It's like seeing how much juice we can get out of these lower position chord tones.

This has been a very useful study for me, because I'm very undisciplined in my playing in general: I'd much rather just improvise and wait and see what happens -- where the music leads me; what areas of the fingerboard I might feel compelled to explore at a given moment, and so on. So this compositional approach where I'm giving myself a set of limitations -- like a filter in a way -- is really enlightening, because it allows a tight focus on a very specific problem, and the studies tend to flow in a very logical, scientific, and linear direction (though I have to resist the temptation to go off on a whole variety of tangents!).

If you have any thoughts on these studies, or would like to explore more of this stuff in your own dulcimer playing, please email me and tell me a little bit about yourself and what you're trying to do with your music. If I get enough feedback, I will be delighted to reconstitute DulciTheory, my email newsletter which has not had an update in a long time (though most of the back issues are available on this web site. See the left navigation column for links to those pages). In fact, the plan is to fold in most of the Modal-Improv material into DulciTheory, since I play it all on the dulcimer anyway.

Arpeggio Study One

For the first study I have employed static chord positions:

2---0---3---2---1---3---|
1---0---1---0---0---0---|
0---0---0---0---1---1---|
        

The idea here is to just arpeggiate each chord from low to high on the quarter note level: pretty nifty when you think about it..... a three-string dulcimer with three even beats to a measure!

Here is the mp3 file of the first study:

waltz1

Arpeggio Study Two

This study is much more involved than the first because it uses consecutive chord tones. Practically, this often means getting more than one chord tone per string:

|-0---2-------|-2-----------|
|---------1---|-----1-------|
|-------------|---------0---|

If you score these studies in standard musical notation, which is a great exercise in itself, you can easily see that the consecutive chord tones we're using here are like the most closely-packed spacing you can find, also known as close-voiced chords.

Here is the mp3 file of the second study:

waltz2

Arpeggio Study Three

This third study is very much like the second, only we're ascending - then descending in each pair of measures:

|-0---2-------|---------2---|
|---------1---|-----1-------|
|-------------|-0-----------|

Here is the mp3 file of the third study:

waltz3

If you are interested in seeing the complete tabs for these studies, please email me, and I'll either email them to you, or post them in a future edition of DulciTheory if there is enough interest.

A Little Extra Holiday Treat

OK, this doesn't have anything to do with DulciTheory, but you just might find it fun to listen to a little segment of my two-handed tapping on this same B minor progression. Only this is not in waltz time. It is in a sort of quasi-Latin straight-8th four-four, with lots of syncopation.

Two-handed tapping on the dulcimer has been a very part-time hobby for me since about 1990, when I taught a few workshops in it at several Ohio dulcimer festivals. In those days, we actually got people doing some cool stuff with tapping, and some folks have come back to me all these years later and shown me some of their new directions. I really wish someone had the time to really develop it so I could go to their classes and bone up on it myself!

Anyway, this little excursion into tapping involves the right hand being a very solid bass player. Listen for the 4-1 beats: the last beat of the measure is hammered on beat 4 and pulled-off or plucked into the root of a chord on beat 1 of a new-chord measure. This is the only thing that ties this music together rhythmically - I've tried all sorts of other methods to get the tapping to come together rhythmically, but this "right-hand as bass player" method is the only strategy that has ever worked:

A Tapping Excursion on The One-Life Jam

And here is a duet I did via overdubs. The first part -- kind of a ground track -- consists of tapping on the A string of a 4-equidistant dulcimer while my Ebow was balancing back by the pickup and driving the string electronically. For the rhythm synch, I used a sample-and-hold patch on my trusty Adrenalinn II beat-box, amp-modeler and filter-synch unit. The second part is a pretty straight acoustic-electric flatpicked part.

A Tapping Duet on The One-Life Jam

Enjoy!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Greetings From Northern Iceland!

Words can't really describe the beauty of the Icelandic landscape here in Siglufjord, but here is a picture I took out the window of the high school where I'm teaching dulcimer (or langspil, really, because there's really not a lot of essential difference):

There are not enough dulcimers to go around the class of about seven people, so there are two langspils which we are tuning similar to the dulcimer. The langspils have three strings and are fretted chromatically under only the melody string. The older langspils tended to be purely diatonic, but sometime in the 19th century, many older Icelandic musical traditions became "Europeanized" and the chromatic system replaced the older diatonic fretting. They used the langspil to introduce music students to theory and harmony.

There are many, many music schools in Iceland: Siglufjord has one and has a population of something like 1,300. Many small towns have their own music schools, so the general population of the country is very musical. I'm learning some Icelandic folk songs from my class, while they are learning the mountain dulcimer. The language is very unusual and exotic to my ears, and many of the songs have really quirky metric structures due to the phrasing and rhyming of the texts. With any luck, I will have a few clues as to some of the pronunciation of the Iceandic language by the time I leave.

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The J C Rockwell Dulcimer Podcast

With the kind help and guidance of Bing Futch, I was finally able to get my first podcast up:

http://www.jcrdulcimer.blogspot.com/

This is the first of a 19 episode series based on my Modal-Improv 1 CD, which I recently completed. Currently, I'm toying with the idea of simplifying and unifying my various blogs and web content: DulciTheory, DulciMusings, and Modal-Improv -- into one main vehicle. This will be a challenge, and is bound to be more of a gradual evolution of the content than anything sudden and dramatic. We'll see how it all shakes out.

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Folk Festival in Siglufjord, Northern Iceland!

I'll be performing, lecturing, and teaching dulcimer at the Folk Festival in Siglufjord, Northern Iceland this July. The festival runs from July 4th through July 8th, and it is held at the folk center that was established recently in this North - Central town previously known for its herring production.

This year, the festival is putting a bit of an emphasis on the fretted zither family of instruments, with the mountain dulcimer, the Icelandic langspil, and the Norwegian Langeleik all represented. I'm also looking forward to developing a couple of dulcimer - langspil duets with Orn Magnusson, who is an expert langspil player and researcher.

This looks to be a really amazing festival all around, with Icelandic folk music having a strong presence, and a variety of eclectic groups from around the world adding classical, jazz, and all sorts of influences to the mix.

They don't seem to have it translated into English yet (the button for English takes you to a English page describing the Folk Center at Siglufjordur), but the 2007 festival web site is now up:

http://www.siglo.is/festival/

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Podcasting, Blogs, and All Sorts of Fun With Computers

Steve Seifert has got FOUR Podcast episodes ready for downloading:

http://www.stephenseifert.com/blogcategory/Podcast/

I was honored to be his very first phone guest for episode 001 of Mountain Dulcimer Folk! Steve is doing this quite often, so you'll want to subscribe to the series, which brings me to the subject of this entry, which is "How Do We Learn How To All These Cool New Things With Our Computers?"

Actually, Steve had to learn an amazing amount of technical things before he could get all the audio, video, and phone stuff working right. When that was mostly in the bag, he then had to figure out how to get a "proper rss feed" happening, so that people could subscribe to his podcast series. To make a long story short, he has graciously included on his podcast page a sort of "Podcasting 101" set of tutorials and links: you'll find it in a box in the upper right of the podcast page.

Blogs

I've been doing some blogging on and off over the past year or so, and I'm getting really psyched to increase the frequency of the posts by a factor of ten or more. Now that I have a laptop, I will be taking every excuse to get to the cafes with wireless networks.

There are two blogs hanging off of this web site, and I will be updating both of them as often as I can. The first is called DulciMusings, and it centers around mountain dulcimers, acoustic and electric, building, theory, technique, wild and crazy ideas, and what ever else related to mountain dulcimers gets me going.

The latest blog is called Modal-Improv, and it is dedicated to learning how to improvise and compose with purely diatonic resources (which basically means that you have only the seven pitches in the major scale to work with: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, and none of the chromatic "accidentals"). This blog is open to mountain dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, folk harp, guitar, mandolin, keyboard, and really any chording instrument. There is a discussion list associated with the blog at Google Groups:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/modal-improv

I'm hoping that these blogs will fill some of the void left by the mothballing of my email newsletter DulciTheory. DulciTheory On The Web has most of the legacy newsletters available for you to download at any time, and I may be updating this in the future, depending on the demand.

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the love between us (all we have is)

This is the title of a new chant/improvisation that I've been working on. It goes well with any form of the cabbage chords, and in my current version, there is a minor V chord (or a bVII), making the progression kind of a "mixolydian cabbage" variant.

The love between us all, the love between us all, the love between us all WE HAVE IS THE love between us all.

All we have is the love, All we have is the love, All we have is the love, the love between us all.

The love between us ALL WE HAVE IS THE love between us ALL WE HAVE IS THE love between us ALL WE HAVE IS THE love between us all.

Here is a pdf of just the melody line (no lyrics or chord symbols) for four times through the 8-bar cabbage progression. I have issued this as a Creative Commons license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Having just the melody line not necessarily associated with specific lyrics or chords may give you more of an opportunity to take this chant to some interesting places on your own.

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NEW CD RELEASE:

e l e c t r o n i c   d u l c i m e r

In December of 2005, I made some home recordings of electric dulcimer using the AdrenaLinn II, which is designed by Roger Linn, a pioneer in the field of electronic music and the inventor of the digital drum machine.

There are twelve selections and most of the tunes are multi-tracked trios with a few duets. There are no other instruments besides the electric dulcimer on this cd, which is interesting in that the AdrenaLinn is designed for the guitar. In some ways it is hard for the electric dulcimer to carve out its own timbral signature -- different from the guitar -- in this environment, but I tried to use some characteristic drone and noter sounds in a few of the pieces. It is also interesting to ponder about "reverse engineering" the tunes for guitar...... I certainly wouldn't want to try it.

If you are interested in synthesizer sounds, filter sweeps, and other sort of electronic sounds for the electric dulcimer, you might want to find out more about this new CD at my DulciMusings blog.

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Announcing:

The 5th Annual Southeast Ohio Dulcimer Festival

Friday, November 10th, and
Saturday, November 11th, 2006!

at the

Federal Valley Resource Center

Stewart, Ohio

Thanks to all who made the 4th Annual SEODfest a great success this year! We were a little smaller than usual this time, but the density and quality of instruction were awesome, and the concert was one of the best showcases of mountain dulcimer styles I have heard in a long time!

There is now a new category for SEODfest 06 in the blog:

NEW Blog: DulciMusings

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