Music Theory Forum

Though this post applies specifically to Doug, I thought it could be instructive for everyone to see, so decided to make it an open post.  Incidentally, Doug Ross is one of the finest musicians I know – his primary instruments being drums and Dulcimer – for which he is an expert on both.  Feel free to click on his avatar in his comments to learn more about him.

Caution:  you are about to enter the advanced music theory no-spin zone. I only expect you to know the theory relative to diatonic scales that we’ve discussed up to this point – and realize that I am presenting concepts you may not (yet) understand.

So Doug, you’ve been asking some interesting questions regarding the Dulcimer, so I took it upon myself to do a little music theory calculating that I thought you might find helpful, and created this Dulcimer chord chart below just for you.   Assuming the most common tuning for a Dulcimer being  D  A  D (this chart only applies to that tuning), the Dulcimer is made up of parallel diatonic scales a 5th apart:

D        E        F#  G        A        B        C#  D

A        B        C#  D        E        F#      G# A

D        E        F#  G        A        B        C#  D

Note:  the  whole / whole / half / whole / whole / whole / half diatonic spacing we talked about in the last blog.

Next, I took each of those notes in both diatonic scales, and extended them into chords (something we’ll learn in an upcoming blog).  I continued the chord extensions as far as I could using only the notes from these two parallel diatonic scales.  The Dulcimer is not a chromatic instrument, so therefore has some limitations – but as you can see, it possesses an impressive palette of chords nonetheless:

I was so impressed with the wide variety of chord types available on the Dulcimer, it inspired me with composition ideas we could use for playing guitar and dulcimer together:)  Enjoy!

Musically yours,

Al