Dance tunes inspire hammered dulcimer innovation
By Harry Ferguson
I was taken by a recent video by the Danish group Dreamers’ Circus of a dance tune called “Bas-Pelles Eriks Brudpolska.” It was composed by Per Västberg (1886-1975). Molly Tuttle has a nifty arrangement for guitar, and Sharon Shannon has recorded it on accordion.
I transposed it to G and put it together with an English country dance tune called “Wine and Women,” or “The Merry Salopians.” You can watch me play it at bit.ly/hdpedal. You can see my new foot pedal in action in the video – it is quite responsive and fun to play.
These tunes, with fast scales and chord changes, benefit from some selective damping between phrases. Even though the dampers on my Nick Blanton dulcimer are extremely responsive, I have always found it hard to coordinate lifting my foot in the right places. The damping I wanted was a quick touch of the dampers just prior to the downbeat, followed by a quick release right on the downbeat. That was when my foot really wanted to be going down rather than up.
My solution was to craft a simple reverse damper pedal, akin to a sustain pedal on a piano. The goal was to have something easy to set up that would not require any modification of the dulcimer. The trick is to have a foot pedal like a teeter-totter. When my foot pushes down on the back of the pedal, the front of the pedal goes up, releasing the dampers. When I raise my foot, a spring pulls the front of the pedal down towards the floor, engaging the dampers.
As shown in Figure 1, below, the key to the design was to have the base for the pedal slide under the front leg of the dulcimer stand to prevent the dampers from lifting the pedal assembly off the floor. The weight of the dulcimer keeps the whole thing on the ground.
My first version had a spring that was vertical. That worked fine, but to get the foot pedal as close as possible to the floor, this design uses a spring running horizontally underneath the foot pedal. Indeed, I used two springs attached to holes drilled through two bolts to keep the springs separated, shown in Figure 2 with the pedal itself removed. That is more elaborate than needed. A single spring would do, but I wanted more tension than the one spring I had on hand, and I happened to have two.
Figure 1 illustrates how the pedal is configured:
- Yellow string: tensions the springs. Looped around a pulley and secured to the top of the pedal. Can be left alone once adjusted.
- White string: runs up from the pedal front to a pulley where the damper strings intersect. Feeds through the pulley, back down to another pulley on the base, then through a small cleat.
- Adjusting the dampers: tension adjusted by pulling the white string through the cleat; un-cleating releases the dampers entirely.
I am publishing these details to put the ideas into the public domain so that anyone can build this and improve upon it for themselves or to sell, as I do not plan to do so myself.
Ferguson is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He has been playing hammered dulcimer since 1983. Find him at stsci.edu/~ferguson.
