Mountain Dulcimer: Learning to Read Music

Hi,

Greetings Danny,

I purchased one of your mountain dulcimers several months ago and am having a ball with it (my first playing experience & I'm 55 years old!)

That's great to hear!

My question involves converting musical notation to tabs. I can only play tabs and I have a ton of tab books. But, there is a lot of music that I would like to play that has not been converted to tabs (as far as I can find). I have found several websites that purport to help in this, but all of them assume that you have some initial knowledge about musical notation -- I do not.

So, do you know of materials that would allow me to look at sheet music for piano or guitar and easily convert it to tabs for the dulcimer?

This is a learned process. The hardest part to this is the fact that the dulcimer is fretted for diatonic playing...along with the fact that it is usually tuned to open D. Hence, you'll be able to adapt tunes written in standard notation...only, you'll have to make sure that all the notes fall within a major key, without artificial sharps or flats that would pull it out of the diatonic scale. Additionally, you'll have to tune your dulcimer to an accommodating key for the song being adapted from standard notation.

I'm not sure if you've seen our online lessons...we offer lessons on our site that have both the standard notation and the tablature written out together.
http://www.folkofthewood.com/page5305.htm

You might glean some ideas from how the standard notation correlates to the tablature...let me know if this helps any.

Mickey

Thanks.

Danny Arnold