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Topic: A Pedal Steel Guitar/Dulcimer Hybrid |
Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 15 Jul 2014 10:38 am |
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The Lap Steel and Mountain Dulcimer are basically the same instrument. I've been building both since the early 60s, and I've built several convertibles that can be used as either.
Both are fingered from above. The mountain dulcimer is even played often with a tone bar called a "noter".
Why not put pedals onto a mountain dulcimer and a mechanism identical to a pedal steel? In effect, you would have a pedal steel guitar with a regular fretboard, so that you pushed the strings against frets instead of using a tone bar. With such an instrument you could produce an amazing array of sounds. Without the restriction of having to use a straight tone bar, and with the fingers having the freedom to finger chord-shapes, there's no limit to where you could go.
A quick way to achieve this would be to build a regular fretboard with frets, to clip over the top of the existing fretboard on a pedal steel, and raise the fretboard to the height where you could press the strings down onto it.
Plus, if you built a curved bridge, you could also play it with a bow.
Here's an instrument I built about 20 years ago. Is it a lap steel or a mountain dulcimer? Actually it's both. You can play it from above like a dulcimer, either acoustically or electrically. By unclipping the fingerboard and replacing it with a lower one, which is the equivalent of fitting a nut riser, you can play it as a lap steel with a tone bar.
Last edited by Alan Brookes on 11 Feb 2017 11:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Earnest Bovine
From:
Los Angeles CA USA
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Posted 15 Jul 2014 2:24 pm
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| You could start by installing all the frets. |
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Peter den Hartogh
From:
Cape Town, South Africa
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Posted 15 Jul 2014 2:49 pm Re: A Pedal Dulcimer?
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| Alan Brookes wrote: |
| In effect, you would have a pedal steel guitar with a regular fretboard, so that you pushed the strings against frets instead of using a tone bar. With such an instrument you could produce an amazing array of sounds. Without the restriction of having to use a straight tone bar, and with the fingers having the freedom to finger chord-shapes, there's no limit to where you could go. |
That includes tapping!
Just listen to this:
http://thetapper.bandcamp.com/album/the-tapper
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Last edited by Peter den Hartogh on 15 Jul 2014 2:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 15 Jul 2014 2:53 pm
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I think on a pedal dulcimer you would have to have all the frets.
Most board zithers, of which the mountain dulcimer is an example, are made to be played in one major and one minor key, and the frets are diatonic. The reason is so that you can slide the fingers of your left hand along the fingerboard and not sound any notes that are not in the key. It is a great incumbrance when you want to play along with other instruments. One of the ways I've gotten around that is by building interchangeable fingerboards with the frets in each of the traditional modes, together with one with all the frets on, and one with no frets. They just clip on and off. At the moment I'm in the process of building an electric mountain dulcimer with a Hipshot Trilogy, which will allow quick changes of tuning.
With a pedal dulcimer you would have all the frets present. |
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Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 11 Feb 2017 11:19 am
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| It's been a while now since anyone commented on this subject. It's such an obvious thing to experiment with that someone, somewhere, must have put a higher fingerboard on a pedal steel to enable him to press the strings down onto real frets, (not just markers). |
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