Warning: A long and somewhat text writeup follows, containing both an account of my completing this task and a personal narrative written more for my sake than yours, as well as digressions on dulcimer tuning and such topics. If you don't care to read it, don't; I did this to get the story off my chest rather than because I wanted votes. Even so, I chickened out of actually completing the task twice.

Anyhow, before we begin, have some background music:



I chose to do this task with a possession that means a lot to me even though I only owned it for a little while. And I'd never told anyone the whole story of why it means so much to me, not even the other main character of the story, who I'll call H. The original was an item of rather poor quality - laughably poor, in fact; my friends and I still look back on it with amusement. There's something telling, to me, about how humorous the item was, given its role in my life.

About two and a half years ago, I built a mountain dulcimer out of cardboard. Now I have decided to recreate it, more or less.

I say "more or less" because I'd much rather get a playable instrument than a perfect replica out of this, and the two are incompatible. But to keep it within the spirit of the task, I decided it had to outwardly look as close to identical as I could make it from my recollection of the original (there are no photographs, and I don't still have it), and be made from the same materials.

The supplies for the original came from the hardware store, except for the cardboard and the strings. There's a bit of wood for the screws the strings are wound around to screw into, some wood screws, epoxy glue to hold the frets onto the sounding board, and nails as frets.

And here is where the personal part comes in. The hardware store was the first place I went when buying supplies for the dulcimer. In fact, I didn't go to buy dulcimer parts; I bought dulcimer parts because I was there and needed to give myself a reason.

I walked into the hardware store on a gray morning at the end of November in 2006, unaware that my friend H had a part-time job there. She was busy putting things on shelves and didn't say anything to me; I don't think she even saw me. But I saw her, and that was enough. Another hardware store employee walked up to me and asked if he could help me find anything. And because I had just seen H, I lied. I said I was looking for wood screws and nails. And then the same part of my brain that prompted me to lie prompted me to think of something to do with them, a way to make it true, and because of how strangely my mind operates sometime I came up with the cardboard dulcimer idea. When she asked if I needed anything else I told her I wanted some epoxy as well, because that was also needed to make the dulcimer a reality.

This time, as before, I went to my local hardware store for supplies. Not the same one, since I'm recreating the dulcimer in North Carolina, while I built the original in Minnesota. But this time, I was really there to get screws, nails, wood, and epoxy. I opted to buy a little more wood than last time, so I could make my dulcimer in a way that would stay in tune, but in keeping with the spirit of the project the main component would be cardboard.

I formed the dulcimer by cutting up a 1x12 pine board, making a 3' board that wouldn't bend whenever a string was depressed. The presence of this piece of wood is the only significant difference in construction from the original. To this I attached a pair of smaller sections that both provide an anchor into which to screw screws that the strings would be attached to and to create some depth to the instrument. After using a hole saw to put an opening in the larger wooden piece, I enveloped the whole thing in corrugated cardboard to form the actual body of the instrument. Then in went the screws - three pairs of them, separated by much of the length of the instrument. Each screw would be one end of one of the three strings. Next, I made the nut and bridge out of three nails each, epoxied to the dulcimer,

Then I measured the precise distance between the two and calculated the spacing of the frets. There are sixteen of them - fourteen numbered 1-14 and spaced so as to produce two octaves of a Mixolydian scale, plus a 6+ and a 13+ to add a little more variety to what you can play. While the frets do have these names, it's not traditional to actually label them explicitly on the dulcimer - but the last time around, I did so in ballpoint pen as I drew in the lines, for my own reference while making it. Naturally I retained these labels on the duplicate.

At this point I hit a bit of an unexpected snag - while the nut and bridge, being identical could be made without knowing which was which, I did need to know the answer for the next part - knowing how far from one end the frets go, I had to figure out where on the dulcimer that meant they were to be. Last time around, it didn't matter which end I started at, since I could just pick one, but now I needed to make sure to place them with the bridge end as the one closer to the whole in the board - and, having sealed up the sides of the box, I had no idea where it was.

I tried tapping the box repeatedly and listening for a change of sound as I moved around, but couldn't find the hole. My plan was put a pair of half-moon-shaped holes in the cardboard to let the sound in. They're not the most traditional arrangement - usually there are either four or six holes, and the only traditional shape for them is a heart (perhaps referencing the factoid every dulcimer player knows that the word "dulcimer" means "sweet music"), but that's not how I did it last time around. I had a pair of semicircles, near the bridge end. But to duplicate them, they had to be placed such that they would line up with the hole in the wood, since an exacto knife isn't exactly the right tool for cutting through three quarters of an inch of pine.

Ultimately I decided to do things a little differently and use circular holes, which I drilled anew through both cardboard and wood. It compromises the exactness of the duplication, but it's better than not completing the task over a little thing like that. I picked an end to be the nut and started marking fret locations, added holes, glued finishing nails on for frets, and began to string the dulcimer.

After I put the bass string on I discovered that at many frets the string made contact with a higher fret and sounded the wrong note. This problem isn't one I'd encountered the last time around, because the all-cardboard construction meant I those frets moved out of the way as the top of the instrument bent. I resolved the issue by making the bridge taller by one nail, and moving some of the frets so that the heads of the nails wouldn't make contact with the strings. Some frets also had too thick a layer of epoxy between them and the cardboard and had to be re-attached after pulling that layer off the cardboard.

Finally, it was ready to finish stringing, tune, and play. Once I had my bass and middle strings in tune with each other or at least damn close (for some reason the bass string got really buzzy-sounding when played at the fourth fret, so instead of tuning it to D and the middle string to its fourth, I tuned the middle string to A440 and the bass string so that it would play the same note at its fifth fret as the middle string did at its first), I managed to snap the melody string trying to tune it to the d above that. Figuring out what string to put on as its replacement was an eye-opener - I realized I'd been tuning the whole damn instrument an octave too high, so it was no wonder I'd broken something.

In the process of retuning correctly, somehow I snapped my bass string. So I resolved to buy some music wire at precisely calculated diameters, rather than strings with the convenience of looped heads already applied, and reattempt this. This time around I opted for a different tuning, as well.

A small digression: There's four major dulcimer tunings that people use. While modal tunings (almost entirely in the key of D) are possible in any of the musical modes, ionian tuning (DAA) and mixolydian tuning (DAd) are by far the most popular. Another option is called "Galax tuning", after the town of Galax, Virginia, and consists of tuning all the strings in unison (generally to d) but putting a small item under the bass string at the fifth fret. All of these only really work if you're playing music in the key the dulcimer is tuned to, and all of them admit the possibility of playing chords but are designed to play the melody on one string (named, not coincidentally, the "melody string") while the other two are sounded as drones. The other, thoroughly modern, option, is 1-3-5 tuning, which is growing in popularity among modern players because it allows access to a full chromatic scale, plus chords in any key whose tonic can be played on the melody string - but this comes at the expense of the more traditional playing styles, since you really can't sound good playing the middle and bass strings as drones this way.

Anyhow, when I originally strung this dulcimer, I couldn't remember what tuning the old one had been built for. I think it was modal, but I'm not even sure of that. So I bought a pack of banjo strings and opted for the tuning that would be the closest match for those string diameters, which was DAd and required that the strings all be slightly too tight for their own good. Having to start again with the strings and regretting that decision immensely, I opted to calculate the tension in advance, then make my purchase. This time I chose strings that could be adjusted to either FAC (a 1-3-5 tuning) or DAd (a more traditional mixolydian tuning). With the tension calculated, I went to the music store to get strings of the right weights, but discovered that they had to back-order the .009" melody string.

At this point I discovered that all my various attempts at tuning the dulcimer had worn out the wood to the point where the screws didn't quite bite it right; after I set the bass string to D, I tried tuning the middle string to an A. The screw unscrewed itself a little before I was even close. I tried using my spare .009" string that I bought, so it would play a higher note. Again, it untwisted itself well before hitting A. I tuned it as tight as I could, then tuned the bass string and melody string to the same pitch, opting to play Galax-style.

This worked. Briefly.

Then the melody string untwisted its screw, and wouldn't hold any tension tight enough to be meaningfully called a note. Like a fool I applied more tension to the screw, hoping to drive it further into the wood than it had been before so that it would once again stay put - forgetting, of course, to remove the string from it first. As I torqued the screw further I somewhat inevitably snapped my last string thin enough for that position.

At first I was frustrated. I really, really didn't want to have to buy yet another freaking melody string Then, suddenly, I had an epiphany. I'd been trying to simulate a personal artifact, but a couple weeks of frustration around the tuning ultimately bearing no fruit whatsoever is in fact a far more exact replica than the original goal had been. I became unexpectedly satisfied.

Suddenly free from my sense that I was obliged to provide sound samples, only one thing remained: the writeup, including why I bothered.

This dulcimer matters as a symbol of the old one, a Simulated Personal Artifact created to recall the original more than to be an item of its own. The original mattered because it saved my life.

The first dulcimer was born from the fall when I had my first episode of major depression - the beginning of the series of such episodes that partly explains why I have not yet graduated from college, and in fact have only two years' worth of college credit under my belt at age twenty-two. I kept what I was going through hidden from everyone I knew, and I hid it well. So well, in fact, that when I finally admitted to people that I was depressed, my friends were floored. They had had no idea - despite the fact that it had sapped so much energy out of me that I was in bed twelve to fifteen hours a day.

That confession to my friends came a few days after I built the dulcimer, and the dulcimer inspired me to make it. The day I saw H at the hardware store, I had decided to kill myself. I left my dorm room with a plan: I was going to go to the hardware store, buy a can of methanol, mix it with some of the ginger beer I had around to make it a little bit more palatable, and drink it. I looked up the lethal dose online - just half a cup - and then I walked the two blocks to the hardware store, which I knew sold methanol along with other solvents in the paint section.

But simply by being there, H reminded me that I had friends who care for me, and that even if I still felt I'd be better off just dying it would be a betrayal of those friends. I was at the worst point in my entire life so far, emotionally if not in other ways, and at that moment when I saw H I realized I had to put up with it - for her sake. And for the sake of everyone else I knew.

If H hadn't been working at that hardware store, I'd never have gotten the reminder. Luckily, she was - so instead of dying, I chose to create a musical instrument. It had some problems, like the fact that when you pressed on the strings at one of the frets the cardboard soundboard warped enough to pull the whole thing out of tune; this made it completely unplayable. But the two hours or so I spent making it, the little while I spent over the next few days trying to teach myself to play it before realizing that wasn't possible, and then the half hour or so when my good friend help im a bear came and made surprisingly good music with it (and I recorded him on the tape recorder I'd been using for interviews in anthro class, though the tape is long since lost or I'd post samples here) are an important event in my life. The dulcimer got thrown out a couple weeks later, largely because it sucked too much to be worth keeping around - but that's OK. It had done its job.

As for the copy, it's done its job too. Someday soonish, though, I hope to replace it by making a proper dulcimer, with a wooden body and tuning pegs and everything - something that can meaningfully be called an instrument.