I would agree with the previous post. I use Meguir's #7 for a polish. You can get it at any auto parts store. When I have a peg hole that isn't holding I just insert a small piece of maple veneer and put the peg back in. Once I have the peg well started, I can cut off the excess sticking out of the ...

Ebony is indeed quite dense and very capable of excellent sound transference. The biggest drawback for ebony is its tendency to check and crack and it doesn't do that well under pressure. Plucked instruments work very differently from bowed ones. On a pucked instrument you really need a very hard si...

Hi Dan, I totally get your point. The beautiful case you made is so suggestive of the very fancy cases that were used for storage of a valuable instrument rather than as luggage. My cases get way too much of a beating to do anything so grand. Again, my compliments for coming up with a case that is s...

I think if you contact Dan Landrum at the Dulcimer Players News he can help you. Dan is a fabulous hammered dulcimer player and is very familiar with a wide variety of tuning sysytems that the instrument uses. If anyone would know about what available here, he would. Tell him that I sent you. Ken Bl...

Wow! What a gorgeous case! This is reminicient of some of the violin cases I've seen from the 18th century. Beautiful job. The case that my Meinel Perfekta zither came in was not in the best shape I had to do some serious rebuilding to make it viable again. Since I travel a fair bit with it, I had a...

I think this is an excellent book and I wish I had it when I was first learning. My approach to scales is pretty much the same but I got there by a somewhat different route. I already had a book called Patterns For Jazz by Jerry Coker. I had used this book for guitar and saxophone to learn all the s...

HI Rudi, I have had this same problem in the past and solved it in a similar way. I keep some mahogany veneer in my zither case. A sliver of that in the offending pin hole has always done the job. Mahogany is a "soft" hardwood. A sliver will have some compressability and still fill the hol...

Aptly put. Developing calluses is basically dealing with a low grade injury. It can help to take some vitamin E to help speed the healing. Just do as much practice as it takes to get a bit sore and stop. That should heal by the next day and then you can go on a bit longer. When the tips of your fing...

The action height you describe is fairly typical. The tension on the strings of a classical guitar is quite low and thus very easy on the fingers when compared to any instrument that has steel strings on it. I find the zither to be about the same as playing any of my steel stringed guitars. My three...

I had been working on some fairly challenging arrangments on guitar with lots of moving basses and such. This involved some pretty athletic left hand work and I kept thinking "there must be a better way!" I was in Westwood Music and spotted a book on how to play the zither by A. Darr. I'm ...