Collaboration leads to new techniques and a new sound for dulcimer players
By Fiona Potts
In 1975, back when Phil Mason published the first issue of Dulcimer Players News, dulcimers were not always easy to find. Today dulcimers are relatively widespread, and they come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your standard teardrops and hourglasses. You can get them tuned a fourth up, like the “Little Mule” by Jim Fox, or even an octave higher, like Ron Ewing’s “Dulcimette.” Baritones are fairly common these days, too, tuned a fifth below the standard dulcimer. And the bass dulcimer, tuned a whole octave below a standard, is also growing in popularity.
Now, thanks to a collaboration between dulcimer builders David Beede and Terry McCafferty, there is a whole new class of dulcimer available, tuned two full octaves below a standard dulcimer. They call it the “L’il D’bl Bass,” or LDB.
How did this innovation come about?
In some ways, it is a story that goes all the way back to James Edward “Uncle Ed” Thomas, born in the 1850s, the father of the mountain dulcimer. He passed his dulcimer pattern on to Jethro Amburgey of the Hindman Settlement School and this pattern influenced Homer Ledford of Winchester, Kentucky. Ledford passed his pattern on to Robert Mize, maker of Maddie MacNeil’s first dulcimer, who passed it on to Larry Barringer.
It was Barringer who shared his knowledge and pattern with McCafferty when he first started making dulcimers. McCafferty, who did not have a musical background, first heard dulcimer music in the 1990s. Wanting to learn by making, he connected with the North Harris County Dulcimer Society in Houston, Texas, who put him in touch with Barringer, the local dulcimer builder. After learning the basics from Barringer, who built his dulcimers with pocket knives and hand tools, McCafferty finished his first dulcimer in about a week. With Barringer’s encouragement, McCafferty began building dulcimers commercially around 1996, and says his designs “continue to evolve.”
The LDB, however, is more than the result of simple evolution. It is the product of a friendship and collaboration between builders. McCafferty relates that he first visited with David Beede about 5 or 6 years ago after attending the Mount Dora Festival. They connected over nuts and bridges, fretboards, and their shared interest in dulcimer building.
One thing that especially captured McCafferty’s imagination was Beede’s solid body double bass dulcimer. He was impressed that it sounded so much like an upright bass and wondered what the sound could add to a jam.
A few years later, in the spring of 2023, knowing he was going to have some “down time” over the summer, McCafferty got to thinking about the double bass again. He reached out to Beede, and they decided to work on something and bring it out together. They began collaborating virtually, with McCafferty drawing up CAD models and going back and forth with them. In September they had a prototype, and in October Beede visited for a couple weeks to update and finalize the design. They made a handful, including one for Aaron O’Rourke and one for Stephen Seifert.
This dulcimer has a lot of unique and innovative features, including the strings. The strings that Beede had used with his original double bass were no longer available, so they had to do some research to find a new product. They did not want to make a dulcimer that folks could not get parts for. They settled on Thunderbrown strings from the Italian company Aquila. McCafferty explained that these rubber strings have metal mixed into the compound, which makes the strings heavy. Heavier strings mean you can get more tension on a smaller diameter string, making them easier to play and more familiar to dulcimer players.
But rubber strings do not work well with wire frets, which led to another innovation, based on Beede’s “Acu-fretless” system. Instead of raised frets, this fretboard has marked grooves to indicate finger placement. These make finding the diatonic notes easy, but allow the player to play the chromatic notes in between the grooves and the “crowd-pleasing slides and runs” that are the hallmarks of the upright double bass sound.
A semi-solid body instrument, the LDB is an electric dulcimer and requires a bass amp to sound right. For folks unfamiliar with amplification, McCafferty includes lots of details and recommendations online, including a complete User Guide. The guide explains how to charge the preamp, how to set up an amp, and even how to care for and change those rubber strings, which McCafferty says should last longer than steel strings.
Playing the LDB requires some different techniques to optimize the sound, but McCafferty notes that this is not an instrument aimed at upright bass players. It is a dulcimer for dulcimer players, a tool for enhancing their jams with the upright double bass sound.
The key to that sound, as Stephen Seifert explains in his instructional video, is silence. Rather than letting the strings ring indefinitely, droning like a standard dulcimer, he says it is important to stop the string from vibrating, putting rests “in between the notes to let the other musicians in the room shine through.” In the video he includes other helpful advice on finding the right notes, jam etiquette, and keeping the beat steady.
To learn more about the LDB and find links to the videos and resources mentioned here, visit mccaffertydulcimers.com/lil-dbl-bass. Find David Beede at davidbeede.com.
