A Great Irish Hymn

Be Thou My Vision is one of  my all-time favorite hymn tunes, and it goes very nicely on the mountain dulcimer. Like Southwind from last week, this one also lends itself to fingerpicking with lots of open strings:

http://www.jcrmusic.com/pdf/bethou_dfp.pdf

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!

Southwind

This is one of my favorite Irish tunes. It appears in my 1984-era tunebook called Dulcimer Solos (which I've been planning to reprint for a long time, but just haven't found the time.), and I still love playing it even now. It is a slow waltz-time tune that is very soothing. This particular arrangement uses a lot of open strings and is best played in finger-picking style. Here you go:

www.jcrmusic.com/pdf/southwind_dfp.pdf

If you right-click on this, you can save it to your desktop.

20 years since the release of "The Blackbird and the Beggarman"

It is hard to believe how fast time flies! My CD of Celtic instrumentals for mountain dulcimer was started in the Fall of 1993 and was released roughly mid-year of 1994. It came out on the Wizmak label, and was produced by Pete Sutherland, a great Vermont-based fiddler, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and all-around great guy. I also had the support of some extremely gifted musicians: R.P. Hale, Ken Lovelett, Niles Hokkanen, and Ron Ewing.

Here is one of my favorites from B&B at SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/jerry-rockwell/song-of-the-chanter

Too dark to work...

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Great Jam-Along Tracks from Stephen Seifert!

OK -- Stephen is using one of my recent Large Hourglass model dulcimers, but I'm not advertising that at all -- I just think this is one surefire FUN way to get your dulcimer playing flowing right along with some great rhythm:

http://youtu.be/H8MDT2OukmI

Stephen has some more great instructional stuff on his web site:

http://stephenseifert.com

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Nice Article on Suspensions!

I always try to keep up with Gary Ewer's blog, and especially the great articles on chord progressions, but this one is REALLY close to home for me:

 http://garyewer.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/chord-progression-tip-creating-and-using-suspensions/

There is nothing more boring than constantly landing on a chord tone right on the important beats of a measure -- and especially beat ONE! When you slam into a 4th and then resolve to 3, it just sounds cool. You can learn about the main kinds of suspensions here in this article, and then I would suggest you get to applying them to your dulcimer, or guitar, or uke, or whatever. Be PLAYFUL if you can... if you keep messing around with this stuff, it will start to become automatic after a while.

Happy Suspensions to you!! 

Cuckoo Elegy Slideshow

Judith Giddings worked out a really great slideshow with her spectacular nature photos to go along with my "Cuckoo Elegy" piece. We're finally live now with this slideshow and soundtrack:

http://youtu.be/75Cj_GpY2Pk

If you like this tune, you might be interested in the other eight tunes in my new "Nine Meditations for Dulcimer" on bandcamp.com:

http://jerryrockwell.bandcamp.com/