Mountain Dulcimer: DAD Tuning

Subject: DAD tuning for a Mountain dulcimer
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 08:21:55 -0400

Folk of the Wood Folks--
I just received my Folkcraft walnut dulcimer and it is beautiful -- what wonderful craftmanship! Having absolutly no prior experience I was able to immediately start picking out a few tunes (Ashokan Farewell, Amazing Grace, I'll Fly Away...). It is a joy to play, I am thrilled with it! The dulcimer arrived basically in tune (the traditional D A A tuning) and using the Korg chromatic tuner that I bought with it I was able to easily tweek the strings so that they were spot on. I like the D A A tuning but I bought a book by Mark Briggs that is mostly for the D A D tuning and wanted to give the alternative tuning a whirl. Having never tuned anything before, but feeling confident with my new Korg tuner, I started to tune the 2 melody strings up to a D. I got as far as a C but then got nervous that I was going to break the strings and tuned it back down to the A. Is the D that I tune the melody strings to suposed to be higher or lower than the A that they were already tuned to? How far can I safely tune the melody strings before I need to be concerned about them breaking, can I just go for the D without worry? Any guidence is appreciated.

Thank you,
Andy Black

Greetings Andy,

I know it's been a week since you've requested this information; unfortunately, it took me a week to set up the DAD Tuning page for your reference. I finished it this evening...it includes the fingerboard layout, the tuning process for relative tuning, along with a video sampler of what DAD tuning should sound like upon completion.

Here's the link:
http://www.folkofthewood.com/page5110.htm

Please get back with me and let me know if it works out for you...if there's anything missing, I'd like to ensure that you have all the info necessary to learn this tuning.

It's always a good idea to have extra dulcimer strings on hand if you're going from tuning to tuning...for, bring them down and up will certainly increase liklihood of breakage. I personally tune my dulcimer to DAA Ionian tuning...you might want to experiment with our online lessons which emphasize this tuning:
For free acoustic music lessons:
http://www.folkofthewood.com/page3.htm

Wishing you the best in your playing efforts, Mickey