DulciCaster
I'm enjoying a lot of dulcimer playing of late, with my interest in the instrument being greatly rekindled. In particular, I've thinking about building a repetroire suitable for public performance in 2008.
Thinking about such things reminds me that amplifying dulcimers (along with all their esoteric acoustic brethren) is a bit of a pain in the arse. If you mic them, you have to fight feedback and ambient noise (invariably, you end up playing these things in coffee houses and the like); if you use some sort of piezo pickup, the sound quality is dramatically altered.
Enter the DulciCaster. Built by dulcimer player turned luthier Quintin Stephens, DulciCasters employ the re-purposed guts of a Line 6 guitar with a custom dulcimer body for an extremely versatile live instrument, ready to be plugged direct into amp or PA.
Most excitingly, the DulciCaster is capable of assuming different tunings at the flick of a switch. Currently, I play pieces in any of 6 tunings, requiring at least 2 dulcimers strung with different string gauges. I can retune quickly, but it's still a show-stopper.
In Construction!
Quintin has already sent me the first of the in-progress photos. Sweet!
the first cuts
notice the half-tear drop, half modernized-hourglass shape
my suggestion — it's called the orca model
