Harder Than It Looks

I am currently working on learning the chords and singing along to "The Parting Glass" which is a wonderful closer at the end of a night of making music. It's a lovely tune, and I'm getting better bit by bit. Mind you, if my autoharp hadn't gone all un-tunable on me I might not be doing this right now, I'd still be working on my repetoire on the more familiar instrument. String changing is a long weekend project, and since I just had to pay to repair a flat tire on my lovely little PT cruiser, I'm lacking the funds for the new strings anyway. So out comes the mountain dulcimer, on it's fancy new stand, which is just lovely, from Ray Lynn Woods. I actually bought the book before the dulcimer arrived last Spring, as I figured Slow Airs would be just my speed starting out.

As you know, I started with the Dulcimer School, and my subscription to that is about to end now that I have a few of the basics down. So I picked up the book and went through it again and found, what I thought, was a good song to start with. Each verse ends with the toast "good night and joy be with you all" and it looks as if I might actually be able to learn this one before the next music party. My fingertips are toughening up once again, and I'm practicing more now too. Now that the cool Autumn temperatures are coming in, I'm really looking forward to making music in my little cottage with my friends. I will be honest with you, I was thrilled with the beautiful cover art on this book as well, it is by the very talented Rachel Arbuckle. My thirst for music, history, song, and instructional notes is thoroughly quenched, and it even comes with a CD to give you an idea of how some of the songs go. This will give me hours of pleasure this winter, and I'm taking a staycation when October switches to November. You may or may not see me blogging about my progress here, depending on my mood. That will be ME time that I sorely need.

So the title of this entry is it's harder than it looks, because Neal makes it look so easy as he plays on a beautiful Folkcraft teardrop dulcimer, a couple of laments.

Beautiful, I have hours and hours of practice ahead of me, but it's music like this that makes me so glad I took up the Mountain Dulcimer.