My first hammered dulcimer, with painting by Patricia Windrow. I built it with the bass strings on the left by accident, but it makes more sense to me to have them there, since pianos have them there. Pine top, walnut sides, maple pegblocks, walnut and tenpenny nail bridges.

Listen to it on Over the Waterfall (where it's a solo instrument) and The Original Dulcimer Song (where it supports the lap dulcimers).

Scroll down for my second hammered dulcimer.

My second hammered dulcimer, with soundhole-free soundboard to emulate that of a piano. It also has no back, like a piano. (A piano has a lid: that's different.) I followed the bass-on-left design I hit upon with Lórien, and I measured the string lengths to be as proportional to each other as frets on a fretboard; hence the swept instead of straight sides. Unfortunately, one of the pegblock pieces eventually split after construction: gee, maybe that's why piano pegblocks are maple plywood. Live and learn. White cedar top, beech (long) and silver maple (short) sides, maple pegblocks, rosewood bridges. This was one of the last instruments I built before my opera career took away most of my luthier time.

By the way, the uniformity of web picture size clouds the fact that Niriel is much larger than Lórien. Compare the width of the deckboards under them.