Dulcimer.ca
Title
Celtic Crafts: Hammered Dulcimers, Bodhrans, Celtic CDs & Music Accessories
Description
Tom’s music career started with piano lessons as a small child but his obsession for music started later. At age eleven Tom was introduced to and fell in love with the bagpipes. Over the next few years, he was driven to do almost nothing else; he won many trophies, medals and certificates at local and international competitions. Tom became the leader of several pipe-bands, taught many students, and played his bagpipes almost incessantly to the delight of thousands of listeners.
One day Carl Nelson (who plays on the CD “Precipice” with Tom) pulled out, from under his bed, a box with the pieces of an old Chinese dulcimer that came to Canada at the turn of the century with the coal miners. Neither Tom nor Carl knew what it was but Tom offered to try to reassemble it for him. The challenge of recreating a musical instrument out of a box of broken pieces was all Tom could think about for several weeks and, while repairing the Chinese dulcimer, he made two copies. One copy he gave to a friend, one he kept, and he returned the “Butterfly” to Carl. Tom’s head was full of tunes that he could play on other instruments but he was amazed at how easily they poured out through the little dulcimer: jigs, reels, hornpipes, airs, and songs spewed forth in abundance. New tunes from sheet music and books started to appear.
As Tom’s proficiency increased, he became aware that the instrument he was playing had serious limitations, so he set out to redesign and recreate. Over the next few years, Tom built many dulcimers and each one was a little different from the last. He increased the size to give him more notes, added bass notes to help him fill in his accompaniment, added transducers for amplification, added fine tuners to speed up the tuning process, developed a curve style to enhance the beauty, and implemented a stressed soundboard principle that increased the voice of his instruments by tenfold.
