Highly cool, VN!

Minor technical inaccuracy in that vid though.  He is using a modern type of bow.

One like this would have been more accurate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....tGp_XZb33A

I don't usually play dulcimer with a bow, myguitarnow, just fingers.  But sometimes I've played it with a little hammer from a hammered dulcimer, bottleneck slide or metal fingerpicks, for variety/experimentation.  Well, a bit more often with the glass bottleneck, since it's kinda fun to alternate between standard dulcimer and slide blues riffs.

I don't use bow on dulcimer much because it makes the strings kinda sticky for fingerpicking.  But right after I'd ordered my violin, I had a bit of insecurity about whether I'd be able to work with a bowed instrument, since I'd never tried one before.  So I bent up a bit of stiff wire and made a loop of cotton thread to stretch over it, like a sort of crude psaltry bow.  "Rosined" it by alternating between semi-hard pine pitch from a tree outside and some hard beeswax until I could get a steady tone with it, and played qaround a bit with it on my dulcimer.  It was kinda fun.

But a few days later (still waiting on the violin) I showed a friend a pic of the violin I'd ordered.  He started going on about how he'd always wanted to play fiddle, but figured he'd get nothing but squeaks out of it for about 2 yrs.  Well, I'd been studying parts of the violin and basic construction.. so a few hours later, we'd cobbled together a sort of crude one string fiddle out of a little wooden box and a dowel and some assorted scraps of wood and a bow out of a piece of thinner dowel and a couple little pieces of wood. LOL  It didn't sound horrid.  Kind of thin and reedy, but easy enough to get notes out of.  And the fingerboard and nut to bridge length were about right, so he found out he could play a little bit.  He still has it and plays on it for fun.  Swears up and down he's going to buy himself a violin/fiddle one of these days.  Time will tell.

Pardon that long-winded digression, but I guess my point is that I try all kinds of crazy things with instruments and sometimes build little instruments to find out what sounds I can get out of them or to get a better idea of the construction or just for the heck of it.

The recording of the vielle isn't exactly like the sound of bowing a dulcimer, but the way it holds onto the midrange and some of the overall harmonic tone reminded me of it a bit.  I would agree though, that it doesn't sound much like a dulcimer being "played proper".

The vielle is definitely a neat sounding instrument, though.