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PLEASE READ - our COVID-19 status

To our Dusty Strings community,

Following ten weeks of working as best we could from home, we have been back in the workshop now since June, and are relieved to be doing what we love, which is building instruments! We have really appreciated everyone's patience so far, and we hope you'll continue to be patient with us. Our first priority has to be the health of our employees and our community, and we are carefully following all of the safety practices recommended and required by the state of Washington. Within those limitations, we are doing the best we can to answer the phones and to respond to orders and emails as quickly as possible, and we're grateful for your understanding if it takes us longer than usual to get back to you!

String & Accessory Orders

We should be able to fill most orders for strings and accessories within a few days. At this point, we don't expect any significant delays, but we will let you know if we think it will be more than a week before your order ships.

Mail Service Disruptions

The mail service has been slower and more irregular than usual in recent months, and we are seeing huge variations in how long it takes a package to arrive, and even how long it sits at the post office before it is scanned into their tracking system. If your package is delayed on our end, we will let you know. Unfortunately, once we have handed it off to USPS, there is nothing we can do to investigate the status beyond what the tracking information shows. Packages are reliably being delivered, just not always in the normal amount of time.

If you are trying to place an order through our website for shipping outside of the US and you receive a "no shipping options available" message, that means that the United States Postal Service is not currently accepting mail for delivery to your country. We are sorry that we do not have any way to get around this, and we hope you can wait until the situation improves!

Instrument Orders

We have resumed building and shipping instruments and would love to answer questions or talk with you about placing an order! If your dream instrument is not in stock, we can make an educated guess about how long it will take us to build it, but please allow some extra time for surprises. We are still adjusting to our limited capacity and safety restrictions.

We sincerely appreciate your support during these uncertain times. It is hard to be a small business in the best of times, and this is a challenge on a scale we haven't faced in our 40 years, so we want you to know that both your continuing interest and your words of encouragement mean a lot to us!

Quarantine Showcase

Much as we would love to, we don't normally have the time or capacity to take photos of individual instruments, so part of ordering an instrument long-distance is accepting that it will have its own unique appearance, and won't be exactly like the one pictured on our website. But while our whole routine was off and our store was closed due to coronavirus precautions, we thought we might take the opportunity to do something a little special and showcase some of the more unique instruments we have in stock. Now is your chance to fall in love with and adopt a particular harp or dulcimer that you love the looks of!

Crescendo 34 with black lacquer and Camac levers

SOLD! $3720 (stand included, case sold separately)

Is it just the moody black-on-black photographs, or does this classy-looking harp have an air of mystery about it? It's rare that we make a harp in all black, since we are so fond of seeing the natural wood through clear lacquer. But making this one reminded us that the wood character is still there in a really cool way! Since we don't use pore-filler for a smooth and shiny look like a grand piano, you get the stunning elegance of black lacquer paired with the beautiful natural texture of the sapele wood underneath. The tone is unchanged by the color, so you can expect our well-loved Crescendo voice, which is rich, balanced, and bright.

FH36S in maple with Camac levers

$6520 (case included)

Our maple harps have a bright, crisp, clean tone, and sometimes people prefer the wood to look straight-grained and clear as well, but we like wood with character!

Crescendo 34 with Camac levers

SOLD! $3620 (stand included, case sold separately)

This Crescendo has a gorgeous, rich, dark red tone and a slight bit of curl on the back!

FH26 in highly-figured cherry with Camac levers

SOLD! $3260 (legs and deluxe case included)

It's not often we see such a stunning example of natural beauty as this piece of cherry wood! (Oh yeah, and the harp happens to sound fabulous too.)

Allegro 26 with Camac levers and black lacquer

SOLD! $2160 (legs included, case sold separately)

The black lacquer gives a dramatic touch to this sweet and balanced-sounding Allegro 26, while still allowing the texture and grain of the sapele wood to show through.

FH34 in cherry with Camac levers and gut strings

$6090 (stand and case included)

Gut strings have a slightly warmer tone and a more grippy tactile feel than nylon strings do.

FH36S in cherry with Camac levers

$6820 (case included)

It's fun to imagine what this cherry tree might have lived through to result in such interesting grain.

FH34 in figured cherry with Camac levers and abalone soundboard inlay

SOLD! $6820 (stand and case included)

It looks as warm and sparkly as it sounds!

Allegro 26

SOLD! $1895 (legs included, case sold separately)

Sapele wood often has a fairly uniform appearance, but occasionally we get a harp with some fun darker streaks or stripes.

D570 with bird's-eye maple rails and pinblocks

This D570 is one of a very limited edition featuring densely-figured bird's-eye maple rails and pinblocks. We haven't decorated a dulcimer like this since around 1980, but we ended up with a small piece of bird's-eye, just big enough for a couple of hammered dulcimer sets, and decided to make something special!

SOLD! $3545 (hammers and tuning wrench included, case and stand available separately)

If you see something on this page that strikes your fancy, send an email to [email protected], and we'll happily schedule a time to give you a phone call. We can answer questions if you have them, and we can take an order deposit if you decide you'd like to adopt a particular instrument. We know these are uncertain times for a lot of people, so deposits will be refundable (minus a 5% processing fee) if things change in the next several weeks and you decide you can't follow through on your order. We will update this page as instruments are adopted, and will also add more instruments as we are able to coordinate socially-distanced photography sessions.

We know you're going to ask, and unfortunately, we don't have a reasonable way to play each instrument for you, but you can get a good sense of what the different models sound like from the audio recordings on our website. It's true that no two instruments sound exactly the same, but it's also true that Dusties are very consistent from one to the next, and we've watched people drive themselves crazy trying to pick out the differences between two of the same model and wood species!