(2000) Realm Music

"All Strings Considered" is a recording that captures musical dialogues between two innovative hammered dulcimer players, Jamie Janover and Michael Masley.

Michael Masley invented "bowhammers" which is his own technique for playing the hammered dulcimer enabling him to pluck, bow and strike the strings simultaneously. Attached to four fingers on each hand, they are similar in shape to traditional hammered dulcimer hammers, except the striking surface is covered with horsehair, like miniature violin bows. They produce bell-like tones when used to strike the strings and violin-like tones when used to bow the strings. Michael also uses thumb-picks, which create the ãpluckedä string tones. He has recorded with artists as diverse as Ry Cooder, Butch Vig, Tom Waits and Zakir Hussain and is included in "Bakers Biographical Dictionary of Musicians -8th edition". Jamie Janover has been playing the drums since an early age, and so has developed his own unique style of playing the hammered dulcimer based on his percussive techniques. He uses custom double-sided wood hammers for a staccato attack except on one track where he too uses the Michael Masley style bowhammers, for a bowhammer dulcimer duet (the first ever recorded). Both Jamie and Michael play custom extended range, fully chromatic instruments with dual damper pedal systems.The combination of their diverse and unique techniques reaches far into new realms of the timbral universe, from cascading symphonies of sound to spacious ethereal ambiance. The music has an intuitive flow that helps the listener to travel to new realms through sound.