It's summer. And what a summer it has already turned out to be! After an unseasonably warm winter in beautiful middle Tennessee, and a very dry spring, we are now experiencing VERY hot temps and a bona fide drought. But summer means outside gigs. Lots of them for this local Celtic string band! Festivals, Civil War re-enactments, 1850's Homeplace events at Land Between the Lake events, and oh yes.... Outdoor Weddings! Under the most usual of summer temperatures and humidity, playing a stringed wooden box - and this wooden box has 68 strings for the "outdoor" version and 91 strings on my bigger "indoor" version - it can be challenging at best trying to keep it in some semblance of "in tune" for outside gigs. Add extreme temperatures and it gets impossible.
So, can we say "honky tonk" dulcimer?! You know what I mean when I say "honky tonk piano".... Think old western movies and a very out of tune saloon piano and a ham-fisted player banging an old-time tune out on it.... now think of that sound on my dulcimer! For those who know me well, you know that I am pretty picky about at least making sure my dulcimer starts out in tune, and hopefully stays in tune with itself during the course of playing for an outside gig. After all - my band also consists of two fiddle players (Melanie and Byron) and fiddles have four strings each - simple to retune to a hammered dulcimer that might be going flat or sharp - and a guitar player (David) with 6 strings - ditto on the retuning. So we make every attempt to at least stay in tune with each other when playing outside in warm summer events (and the occasional cold winter event).
So, now for a quick physics lesson.... Who knew playing a very old (2000+ years) traditional instrument would require more than percussion skills, chord theory, musicality and a phenomanal ability to memorize hundreds of tradtional tunes. It takes physics also! Here's the issue.... Temperature AND humidity become a hammered dulcimer player's best friends AND enemies. And adjusting for both can be very interesting. Wood expands when humidity increases as it absorbs more moisture from the air. This expansion causes the strings to tighten on the instrument - which causes the pitch of the strings to rise. This tends to be a small consistent expansion so at least the instrument goes out of tune (or sharp) consistently - and stays in tune with itself. Temperature - especially extremes (inside 72 degree house moving to outside 104 degree day) causes metal to expand, which means the strings are looser on a wooden box that may also be expanding from increasing humidity. So looser strings means lower pitch - except the strings are different gauges, so they expand at different rates unlike the fairly consistent and slower rate of expansion to the wood in the humidity change..... And suddenly the dulcimer is going flat but NOT consistently with itself and thus we have... "Honky Tonk" Dulcimer! Yikes.
To all of Red River Breeze's loyal fans and appreciative listeners at the outdoor gigs we have played for this HOT summer, I am extremely grateful for the nice comments you have made about our music. Thanks for not commenting about the really "out of tune" dulcimer! Honestly... I have tried to keep it in tune...! But 100+ degrees is as hard on hammered dulcimers as it is for the hammered dulcimer player trying to play in this extreme heat! And for my band mates (who only have 4 or 6 strings to contend with), my appreciation also for not making faces that the audience can see when I hit THAT string that has gone really south in the 30 minutes since we started the set!
As I write this, the heat wave has finally broken (although it is only July - August is still to come) and it is mercifully raining - a long, slow, steady, soaking rain. Here's to getting to play melodic (in tune) hammered dulcimer tunes the next time you hear us play outside!
-Stephanie Taylor
