Customer Reviews

Morrell Music MTMD-3 Tennessee Mountain Dulcimer (Natural)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a gorgeous instrument. The leaf and line cutouts are both functional and aesthetically pleasing, and the dulcimer resonates beautifully. You can hear the sound reasonate for several seconds after you have stopped playing. It is essential to use a pick, though; the sound is flat and sounds rather quiet if you pluck the strings with your fingers. Thus my 4 star rating. Purchase a few soft rubber guitar picks to increase sound vibration and decrease the clacking on the strings that a hard plastic pick induces. This dulcimer is a great buy for all dulcimer players.

I bought this lap dulcimer for my husband for Christmas last year and it's going to need some adjustments before it gets to a playable level. The strings are too far from the neck board (like the "action" on a guitar) of the instrument to be easily fretted. I still haven't done anything about it yet and it's been almost a year, but I'm going to take it to a guitar luthier and have her bring the bridge down a good bit.

It looks very home-made, like just out of a kit. Maybe I should have bought a kit for him to build it himself. Hindsight is 90-90, right? It's not a bad instrument. It's plain-jane with a little bit of decorative vine-like leaf cut-outs with hand-drawn black lines (felt marker?) for the vines. It was done in a hurry no doubt.

The machine tuning pegs work well to tune the instrument. That's nice because it can drive you mad to try to tune something with a bad mechanism. It came with no stain or finish on the body, only raw plywood. The neck board (for lack of a proper term, I just use guitar terms here) is stained a chocolate brown as well and the head which has a nice decorative scroll shape on the top. The frets seem to be inserted well. There is a line on the neck board where it looks like a saw just lightly started to saw out the groove for a fret but was stopped before any real damage was done. I'm o.k. with that since it doesn't effect the playability of the instrument and it is hard to see. It's top-heavy because of the large scroll on the head so it will tilt off your lap if you're not careful. Since I'm not a dulcimer expert I'll just say the voice is medium loud and sounds like all the other lap dulcimers I've heard.

My husband has shown very little interest in this instrument because it's hard to fret. It's not easy to play unless you use a slide. Fretting is just way too much work. Maybe after I get it fixed he'll want to learn to play it.

This dulcimer came with one very positive customer review about its wonderful sound quality. Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the poor esthetics to even GET to the sound quality. The cut-out "leaves" of the instrument are attached with what appears to be a BLUE ball-point pen. I couldn't believe it! I returned the product immediately and bought another brand of instrument that arrived BEAUTIFUL and with a case for $20.00 more.