Following on from my review of the Ken Kolodner and Mary Lynn Michal’s book on Chord Theory and Mapping for Hammered Dulcimer, which I pretty much gave it a “thumbs up”. I suggested you needed to tackle this book a few pages at a time with your dulcimer to hand. Someone must have heard me…
In January 2021 Mary Lynn started a weekly “Zoom” course going through the book, topic by topic. It was live a on Sunday nights at 8pm UK time, but also recorded so you could view it at anytime. The course soon filled up to the maximum Zoom could handle, so new student were only offered the recorded version. However there was a question and answer forum for all students.
I paid for the whole year, I knew I just needed to do it. It stuck me that at $6 a session it was a bargain. However I did wonder if the first few sections of the book were going to be a bit like taking a degree in the blindingly obvious as it was about dulcimer layout, circle of 5ths, scales and a few exercises, all of which I thought I knew. Until, of course, we went through them in great detail and I realised just how much I had skated over.
Simon the Sloth made many appearances throughout the year, he is the king of the “slow down”. We would get part way through a topic and Mary Lynn would invoke “Simon” and just slow it all down to make sure we were all keeping up, she also made a few videos running at “sloth speed” on some of the exercises.
I found that spending half an hour on, sometime, 2 pages of the book and actually studying it with the dulcimer and someone explaining it with examples really worked for me. I then had the rest of the week to go over it again, watch the video if I needed to, and ask questions via email or the online forum and share progress with other people. I was assigned a “practice buddy” who I am in contact with and we leave videos of progress and have a chat from time to time (we have a 7 hour time difference but that doesn’t stop us!).
Week by week additional resources like flash cards and quizzes were created for us, along with additional videos. Whenever possible example tunes were used and some of these were offered at a reduced price if you wanted to purchase the video lessons.
The momentum of doing a weekly course suited me, I studied for 8 years with the Open University so I was used to having to run to keep up and never, ever, stop. If you don’t understand something, carry on and the next topic may well help to make sense of it all. But do not stop for several weeks on a topic until you understand it before moving on rarely ends well!
In my book review I had said the second half of the book was for intermediate to advanced players as it covered difficult topics like 7ths and secondary dominants which looked tricky to say the least. We spent several weeks going through just one or two pages per session while we covered these sections and, personally, I actually think I now understand this. I think Mary Lynn’s approach of tackling it piece by piece, giving us example tunes, and created some really great resources like flash cards and quizzes to test your understanding really helped.
Now the course is offered as a video series so you can go at your own pace and replay sections as many times as you want, skip areas if you wish. I find that if I need to brush up on a particular area I can just replay the video to my hearts content, I still find new things every time I watch one.
The course is offered through HD Homeland (https://www.hdhomeland.com/).
