Musical fun?

[Gwyn]

I have played music most of my life, starting with French horn through school, piano and now dulcimer. I have been enjoying my dulcimer again and found a one time workshop a couple hours away to energize my playing, but otherwise I'm kind of all alone with this one. If you play an instrument and are not able to get lessons or join sessions, what kinds of things do you do to keep improving? (Besides the obvious "practice").

[kally]

I play the native american flute and there is no one here who plays it. I am on an island (sort of). So I play along with YouTube quite a lot. I also ordered CD's that give you an accompaniment so that you can play along with them too.

[steve s]

I play clarinet and recorders, pretty different from strings, so YMMV.

(1) I like to play a lot of unfamiliar music to keep my playing "fresh". I find a lot of music on the internet,most of it available free and legal. I don't know where you can find the charts dulcime0 players use,but these places may be a good start:

These resources are more oriented to classical music and earlier , but they may have some folk. I use these all the time.

http://www.icking-music-archive.org/index.php

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

(2) When I play alone, I decide for each "session whether I will deeply practice something (repeating difficult passages,etc.), or just try to play pieces through and have fun, focusing foremost on bigger picture stuff like tone,pitch consistency,etc.. I think both types of sessions improve my playing.