Playing Chords on the Hammered Dulcimer to Accompany Lead Instruments

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Tim Van Egmond here for expertvillage.com and I am speaking about the hammered dulcimer. If you would like to find out more about me, you can go to my website www.timvanegmond.com. What I would like to do now is to give a very basic introduction to the idea of accompaniment. The dulcimer is a beautiful instrument for playing the lead for playing the melodies but it also is very effective for backing up with harmonies and chords when someone else is playing the lead or also when you are accompanying singing. Basically what you want is to know the chords on the instrument and one simple way to start on that is to know that a chord can be the first, third, fifth and octave. That would be a major d here and then there are what are called inversions where you start on a different note of that same series of notes. So instead of going from what is called the root starting on the d, you went to the f sharp you would be going. So you can do a d chord with an arpeggio where you are just going up and down. You could also do a d here and then go to a g. So many of; let’s stop this ringing while I am speaking. Many tune books that contain fill tunes will also have the chords written out and you can work from that or if you know the key that the tune is in, very often are ways that the chords are worked out of the melody pretty easily. That would be I think all there is to it, for beginning. What I was demonstrating were the basic 1, 4, 5 pattern in the d major key. So it would be a d, then a g, back to d, back to go to a , d, g, a, a and d.

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