Focused exercises to maximize your practice time.
By Fiona Potts
The title of Dr. Mark Alan Wade’s new hammered dulcimer book caught my eye: “15 MORE Minutes a Day: Technical Studies for Hammered Dulcimer.” I am an absolute beginner at the hammered dulcimer, with my hands a bit full at the moment, but I thought, “I can do 15 minutes.”
Spoiler alert: I do not find 15 minutes every day, but I am still glad I bought this book.
It is a sequel to “15 Minutes a Day,” but you can use it independently. The idea behind both books was to create and organize short, focused exercises for maximum impact, similar to warm-up exercises that are common practice for other instruments.
If you feel like your playing has stagnated and your practice time is ineffective, this is the book for you. It is packed full of exercises for a variety of playing techniques, but what I like best is that Wade does not leave you on your own to figure them out. Each set of exercises comes with detailed instructions for how and why to play them.
He bills the book as “beginner to advanced,” but I found that a base level of knowledge was necessary, like how to read notation and find the notes on your instrument. For someone like me with extremely limited knowledge, that put some exercises out of my reach for now, but that says more about me than the book. Many exercises have already been incredibly useful, ensuring I start off my playing on the right foot, or rather hand.
Some of the hand independence exercises, for example, do not even need to be played on a dulcimer to be effective. I also found the section on tone, describing what part of the string produces the best sound, with exercises focused on aim, to be particularly illuminating, and something I am glad to have learned early on.
Wade packs a lot of music theory knowledge into these pages, too. If you lie awake at night haunted by chord terminology like Csus, CM7, and C7, or wondering about the best way to play the 2nd inversion, this book has the answers you need.
Buy “15 MORE Minutes a Day” as a spiral bound hard copy or a PDF download at MarkAlanWade.com.