I purchased my hammered dulcimer a few years later after I started playing persian santur, being the second member of this family of instruments I came to posess. My main motivation was to explore a similar instrument that had wider tuning capabilities because I was feeling a bit limited by the santurs diatonic nature.

Although it is not a fully chromatic instrument I was really satisfied with it at the time, since it allowed me to play in diferent keys without the need to retune. However my favourite instrument has always been the persian santur for its timbre and technique so for a long time I just used the instrument ocasionaly for recordings and creating arrangements.

However, in these last years I started to play it again and decided to adapt it for medieval music. After extensive experimentation I adapted different styles of playing for the dulcimer. Plucked as the historical psaltry using kanun plectrums and rings, with padded hammers resulting in a more mellow sound similar to persian santur and with the traditional wodden hammers for a strong and resonant timbre.

For those unware, the hammered dulcimer is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. It is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs.
The dulcimer, in which the strings are beaten with small hammers, originated from the psaltery, in which the strings are plucked. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings.

A dulcimer usually has two bridges, a bass bridge near the right and a treble bridge on the left side. The bass bridge holds up bass strings, which are played to the left of the bridge. The treble strings can be played on either side of the treble bridge. In the usual construction, playing them on the left side gives a note a fifth higher than playing them on the right of the bridge.

The dulcimer comes in various sizes, identified by the number of strings that cross each of the bridges. A 15/14, for example, has 15 strings crossing the treble bridge and 14 crossing the bass bridge, and can span three octaves. The strings of a hammered dulcimer are usually found in pairs, two strings for each note (though some instruments have three or four strings per note). Each set of strings is tuned in unison and is called a course.

As with a piano, the purpose of using multiple strings per course is to make the instrument louder, although as the courses are rarely in perfect unison, a chorus effect usually is generated. A hammered dulcimer requires a tuning wrench for tuning, since the dulcimer's strings are wound around tuning pins with square heads.