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3 strings · D3–D6 · No capo · D · Today’s standard — Mixolydian from the open string, and the tuning every modern tab is written for.

Tap a string, or drag down across them to strum. On a keyboard the letters on the strings are the ones to press — they follow the strings, melody first.

Songs21 songs to play

Every song here is public domain — traditional melodies and classical pieces free for anyone to publish. Pick one to hear it played on the strings, or switch to practice mode and the instrument will wait for you to find each note. Want something else? and share it as a link.

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Virtual Mountain Dulcimer

A playable mountain dulcimer in your browser, fretted the way a real one is — diatonically, so the frets walk a scale rather than a chromatic ladder, and two frets apart is a third rather than a tone. Strum down across the strings and the bass and middle drone underneath while you play the melody on the top one. That is the whole instrument, and it is why this is the one people learn in an afternoon.

The frets are a scale, not a ladder

This is the first thing to know about a mountain dulcimer and the thing that surprises everybody who arrives from a guitar. The fretboard is diatonic: there is a fret for each note of a scale, and no frets for the notes in between. Most of the frets are a whole tone apart and only two in each octave are a semitone, so moving up two frets is a major third rather than a whole tone, and moving up seven is a full octave rather than a fifth.

Look at the numbers under the board and you can see it: the gaps are uneven, and they are uneven in a pattern that repeats every seven frets. That pattern is a Mixolydian scale — a major scale with a flattened seventh — measured from whatever the open string is. It is not a design choice we made for this page. It is how the instrument has been fretted for as long as it has existed, and nearly everything else about playing one follows from it.

The payoff is enormous and it is the reason the dulcimer is handed to beginners: the notes that would sound wrong in the key are physically absent. You can put a finger down more or less anywhere on the melody string, strum, and it will belong. Very few instruments do that, and no chromatic one can.

Two of the three strings are drones

A dulcimer is not tuned to a chord you strum shapes on. It is tuned to a drone: the bass and middle strings sit at D and A, a fifth apart, and in the traditional style they are never fretted at all. You strum all three, they ring underneath, and the melody is played on the top string alone.

That is why this instrument can be played with one finger — or with a wooden noter, which is one contact point by definition. It is also why it sounds so much bigger than three strings ought to: the two open strings keep sounding the whole time, so every melody note arrives over a held fifth. Let a strum ring out on the board above and you can hear them carrying on after the melody note has gone.

You can fret the drones — the two lower strings here respond anywhere, and that is exactly what chord-melody playing in DAD does. They are drawn slightly dimmer than the melody string because in the older style your left hand never goes near them, not because anything here stops you.

The 6½ fret, and why it exists

Between the 6th and 7th frets there is a half-width fret marked 6½. It is set into the board from the melody side only on most instruments, which is how it is drawn here, and it is a twentieth-century addition to a much older instrument.

Here is what it is for. The frets give you Mixolydian from the open string, and Mixolydian has a flat seventh — so in DAD, counting up from the open D, the note where a D major scale wants a C sharp is a C natural. Play a tune that needs to resolve and it never quite lands. The 6½ fret is that missing C sharp, and with it the open string gives you a plain major scale.

Try it: play up the melody string using frets 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and listen to the seventh note sag. Then play the same run but take 6½ instead of 6. That second version is the scale nearly every modern dulcimer tab assumes you have.

This is also the single most useful diagnostic for an instrument that sounds wrong for no apparent reason. If a dulcimer is perfectly in tune string by string and still sounds unresolved in DAD, go and look at the board: an instrument built before roughly 1980 very often has no 6½ fret, because it was built for DAA, where the scale starts at the 3rd fret and the problem never comes up. Our dulcimer tuner covers that check and the rest of the tuning routine.

DAD and DAA

The tuning selector above changes one string. The bass stays at D and the middle stays at A in both — that is worth knowing at the instrument, because it means switching tunings is never more than one peg.

DAD puts the melody string at D4, an octave above the bass. You get Mixolydian from the open string, the major scale from the 3rd fret, and — with the 6½ — the major scale from the open string too. Because the outer strings are an octave apart, chords across all three work, which is why DAD became standard and why modern tab is written for it.

DAA drops the melody string to A3, in unison with the middle string. Now two strings drone instead of one, the major scale starts at the 3rd fret, and the sound is older and more open. This is the traditional tuning, it is what most pre-1980 instruments were built around, and for pure noter-and-drone playing many players still prefer it.

Two further tunings you will meet in books are DAC, which puts you in Aeolian with the scale starting at the 1st fret and is used for minor-key tunes, and DAG, which gives Dorian from the 4th fret for modal fiddle tunes. Neither is offered here, and the reason is worth stating plainly: the sources in this repo record their modes and their starting frets but not which octave the melody string sits in, and a melody string an octave out is a playable instrument that is quietly the wrong one. We would rather describe them than draw one wrong.

The capo rotates the scale, it does not transpose it

A capo on a dulcimer does the physical thing you expect: it clamps across all three strings at a fret and everything above it becomes the new instrument. On the board above the frets below the bar disappear, because on a real dulcimer there is a piece of hardware sitting on them.

What it does musically is the surprise, and it catches out almost everyone arriving from a guitar. Because the fretboard is diatonic, a capo does not move the scale up — it starts it from a different degree. Whichever fret you clamp becomes the new tonic, and the notes above it are whatever the original scale had above that degree. So the mode changes with every position.

From DAD, that works out like this. A capo at the 3rd fret gives you G major — a plain major scale, and the reason G is the standard session key and the reason almost every dulcimer capo ever sold spends its life at the 3rd fret. The 1st fret gives E Dorian and the 4th gives A Dorian: both perfectly real, both used for modal tunes, and neither the E major or A major a guitarist would assume. The 2nd fret gives F sharp Locrian, which has a diminished fifth in it and is very close to unplayable.

This page therefore offers the two positions that give a full major scale, rather than a row of key buttons that would quietly hand you a mode you did not ask for. If you want the modal positions on a real instrument they are there and they are worth exploring — just do not expect a capo to behave the way it does on a guitar.

Reading the numbers

Dulcimer tablature is written in fret numbers — three lines, one per string, with the melody line on top, and a number saying which fret to stop. That is what the strip under the board shows, and it is why the melody course is drawn at the top here.

The song labels use this site’s shared scale-degree notation rather than fret numbers, because one library serves every instrument here and a kalimba has no frets to count. The two are easy to hold side by side once you know that on this instrument, in DAD, the open melody string is the tonic and each fret up is the next note of the scale.

What the sound is made of

Nothing on this page is a recording. Each string is a plucked-string model — a wave travelling the string’s own length and back, losing a little at every reflection — rendered the instant you touch the board, which is why the first note sounds immediately and why the instrument stays in tune at any capo position.

What makes it a dulcimer rather than a harp or a lyre is not the string, it is everything else. The strings are steel and they are struck with a pick rather than a fingertip, so the attack carries far more high frequency than a nylon-strung instrument. The body is a shallow hourglass or teardrop box, long and narrow and only a couple of inches deep, and a box that size has a pronounced air resonance up in the low mids and almost no output below it — which is why a dulcimer sounds present and sweet rather than deep, and why the open bass string is heard mostly through its harmonics. The melody course renders as two strings a few cents apart, struck a couple of milliseconds apart, because that is what a doubled course is.

The one thing here not checked against a chart is that timbre, and it is worth saying so rather than implying a measurement: there is no reviewed figure for a dulcimer body in this repo, because there is no such thing as the dulcimer body — they are built by hand from whatever wood the builder had. The notes are checked. The tone is modelled.

What this cannot do

The right hand. A strum has weight, direction and a rhythm that lives in the wrist, and a pointer has one velocity and no angle — so every stroke here is a competent strum and none of them is your strum. On an instrument whose whole sound is a repeated strum over drones, that is not a detail.

Nor is there any damping. A real player stops the drones with the heel of the hand between phrases, and nothing here does, so a fast passage lets the bass pile up in a way it would not under real hands.

And it is a lap instrument. The posture, the noter in the left hand, the way the box sits against you and gives back some of what you put in — none of that is on a screen. A mountain dulcimer is one of the least expensive acoustic instruments there is, and this page is at its most useful as a way to know what you are buying.

Questions

Why are the frets not evenly spaced like a guitar?
Because a mountain dulcimer is fretted diatonically rather than chromatically. A guitar has a fret for every semitone, so every fret is one semitone up. A dulcimer has frets only for the notes of a scale, so most of its frets are a whole tone apart and only two in each octave are a semitone. The practical consequence is the thing that confuses every guitarist who picks one up: two frets apart is a major third here, not a whole tone, and you cannot play a wrong note by accident nearly as easily. It is also why the instrument is so quick to learn — the notes that are not in the key are simply not on the fretboard.
What is the 6½ fret and do I need one?
It is an extra fret set between the 6th and the 7th, and in DAD you need it for almost anything in the tuning’s home key. The diatonic frets give you a Mixolydian scale from the open string, which is a major scale with a flat seventh — so playing up from the open D you reach C natural where a D major scale wants C sharp, and the tune never resolves. The 6½ fret is that C sharp. Almost every dulcimer built in the last forty years has one; most older instruments do not, because they were built for DAA where the scale starts at the 3rd fret and the problem never arises. If a dulcimer sounds permanently unfinished in DAD and every string reads correctly on a tuner, a missing 6½ fret is the first thing to check.
What is the difference between DAD and DAA?
Only the melody string, and what it does to your right hand. In DAD the melody string is D4, an octave above the bass, which gives you the Mixolydian mode from the open string and lets you play chords across all three strings — it is today’s standard and what essentially every modern tab is written in. In DAA the melody string drops to A3, in unison with the middle string, so you have two drones instead of one and the major scale starts at the 3rd fret. DAA is the older tuning and is better for pure drone-and-melody playing; DAD is better for chords and is what you will find at a jam. The bass and middle strings never move between them.
How many strings does a mountain dulcimer have — three or four?
Three courses, and usually four strings. The bass and middle are single strings; the melody is normally a doubled pair tuned in unison, which is what people mean by a four-string dulcimer. It is one course played as one string — the pair is struck by the same stroke and fretted by the same finger — and the slight beating between two strings that are never perfectly in tune is a real part of the sound, which is why the melody course here is drawn and modelled as two. Some players remove one of the pair to make fretting easier; some instruments ship with three single strings. None of that changes the tuning.
What is noter style?
Playing the melody with a short wooden dowel — the noter — held in the left hand and slid along the melody string, while the right hand strums all three strings and the bass and middle ring as drones. It is the traditional Appalachian way to play, it predates chord playing on the instrument, and it is why a dulcimer can be played competently within an hour: there is one moving contact point and it only ever travels in one direction. Dragging along the melody string on this page models that gesture — the string speaks again each time you cross a fret, softly, because nothing is picking it.
Is this the same as a hammered dulcimer?
No, and the two share very little beyond the word. A mountain dulcimer is three fretted courses on a lap, played with a pick or a noter, and everything on this page — the frets, DAD, the 6½, the drones — applies to it alone. A hammered dulcimer has no frets at all: it is around a hundred strings in twenty-three to twenty-nine courses stretched over two bridges and struck with small mallets, laid out by a geometric rule rather than named by a three-letter tuning. If you are here for that one, our hammered dulcimer tuner covers its note maps and the fifth rule behind its layout.
Why do some songs say they will not play?
Because the notes are genuinely not on the instrument, and that is a fact about a diatonic fretboard rather than a limitation of this page. A dulcimer in a given tuning has one scale under the frets plus whatever the 6½ adds, so a melody containing an accidental outside it has nowhere to be played. This is the same filter that stops a pentatonic guzheng being offered songs with a fourth or a seventh in them: every song is checked note by note against what the instrument can actually reach, and nothing is quietly transposed or altered to make it fit. Changing tuning or moving the capo changes which songs pass.
Why is the capo only offered at the 3rd fret?
Because on a diatonic fretboard a capo does not transpose the scale, it rotates it — and only one position keeps a major scale. Clamping at a fret makes that fret the new tonic, and what you get above it is whatever the original scale had above that degree. From DAD, a capo at the 3rd fret gives G major, which is why G is the standard session key and why that is the position everyone owns a capo for. The 1st fret gives E Dorian and the 4th gives A Dorian — both real and both minor-sounding rather than the E and A major a guitarist would expect — and the 2nd fret gives F sharp Locrian, which has a diminished fifth and is close to unplayable. Rather than offer key buttons that quietly hand you a mode, this page offers the two that give a full major scale. The fret numbers here are always counted from the nut, capo or no capo, which is how they are named on the instrument.
Can I learn the mountain dulcimer on this?
More of it than on most virtual instruments, because the two things this page can give you are the two things that make the instrument what it is: where the notes are on a diatonic fretboard, and what it feels like to carry a melody over ringing drones. Both transfer directly. What a screen cannot give you is the right hand — a strum has weight, direction and a rhythm you feel through the pick, and that is most of what makes a dulcimer sound like music rather than like notes. Use this to learn the neck, and get a real one for the strum; they are among the cheapest acoustic instruments there are.
Is the sound recorded from a real dulcimer?
No — nothing here is recorded. The strings and the body are synthesised as you play, which is what lets the first note sound in the frame you tapped it, and lets the instrument stay in tune at any capo position or concert pitch, where a fixed set of samples smears. The trade is that the timbre is a plausible dulcimer rather than a specific one; the section on what the sound is made of says which parts are modelled from the instrument and which are chosen.
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