Be a big fish in a small pond. There are 30 million guitar players in the US. If I’m in the top 1%, that still means there are 300,000 others at least as good as me. There are probably fewer than 100,000 active fretted dulcimer players in the US, and the vast majority are focused on more traditional repertoires. I’ve found a really cool niche!
As a part of our series about creating a successful career in the music industry, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Sam Edelston.
Sam Edelston is on a mission to showcase the fretted dulcimer’s cool factor, bringing it out of its Appalachian roots and into the public eye as a versatile instrument for all genres. A dynamic performer and instructor, he has played at major dulcimer festivals across the U.S., from Kentucky Music Week to the Colorado Dulcimer Festival, and has been featured by The Folk Project (NJ) and the Folk Music Society of New York. His viral YouTube videos, including Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” highlight the dulcimer’s unexpected range, while his rendition of “Sweet Caroline” is showcased at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. With a packed 2025 schedule spanning Maine to North Carolina, Sam continues to push the boundaries of what this instrument can do, proving that the dulcimer deserves a place in modern music.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
Sure. I grew up in a non-musical household in a town in New Jersey. I had five years of piano lessons, at which I was unexceptional. When I was 14, I started making up songs — which I would bang out on the piano while singing at the top of my lungs in the living room — so my parents handed me a guitar, so I could move the racket up to my bedroom. I started learning songs from New York’s Top 40, oldies, and country radio stations. And I kept writing songs. It just seemed like the thing to do. I wrote my 400th song before I finished high school.
Outside of music, also when I was 14, my father started a business, and so we kids got put to work at various clerical jobs. For a while we had the fulfillment department in our basement. It was kind of funny having delivery trucks drop off 20 cartons of materials in our suburban driveway. And after I took a basic accounting class in tenth grade, I got the job of balancing the company’s books each month. So I never had to look outside for a minimum wage job, and in fact I got to have some of my friends as coworkers.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
First, I’d better say what my career path is. My main weapon these days is an instrument called the fretted dulcimer, or the mountain dulcimer. It’s usually considered a “folk” instrument, and the great majority of players stick with the traditional folk repertoire. For many years, I had zero interest in fretted dulcimers, because I didn’t think you could play much that interested me on them. I was a fingerstyle guitarist accustomed to playing complete-sounding arrangements, and I assumed you couldn’t do that on just three strings. Then I sat down with one, and in less than two hours, I was playing T Rex’s “Bang a Gong” with melody, backbeat, and fills. Omigod, this thing is interesting, after all! So I had this epiphany that dulcimers are great for playing mainstream popular music, and now my mission is bringing this instrument to mainstream music.
I kept happily working full-time at the family business. I did music on the side, performing and teaching occasionally. When we sold the company four years ago, I asked my wife if it would be okay for me to do music full-time, and she said yes.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Sure. Here’s a story about the value of having friends and fans, and the butterfly effect.
In 2014, I had been posting YouTube videos of, mostly, classic rock songs for a couple of years, and at one point I decided to make a video of the Led Zeppelin song, “Whole Lotta Love.” I came up with an electric dulcimer arrangement and did some cool things with the pedals that made it sound like multiple instruments. I recorded it one evening after work and put it on YouTube. A couple of weeks later, a friend and fan of mine named Joanne told a WBAI disk jockey named Kimberly Massengill about it, and Kimberly reached out to me and asked if she could play it on her show.
A couple of days after she played it (and said some really nice things about me), it got shared by a band called Papadosio, which had 75,000 followers, and it also got picked up by a “content aggregator” website, and within days, it started getting picked up all over the place. For the next year or two, every time Guitar World magazine ran an online story about Jimmy Page, one of the “You may also be interested in…” links was to their story about my video.
This was the event that really put me on the map. I started getting invited to perform at distant festivals and things like that. All because my friend mentioned my video to a DJ she followed. I went viral for something that brings people great joy. I know how fortunate I am, and I’m thankful for it every day.
You probably have a lot of fascinating experiences. Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I could give you hours of great stories about this one, but I promise I’ll hold back. Recording my album, MAKING WAVES, was an incredible and educational experience. As far as I can tell, this is the first studio album to feature a fretted dulcimer leading a rock band playing almost entirely classic rock and pop songs. Its specific mission is to showcase the dulcimer as a rock instrument. Because I intended it to be groundbreaking, I did it in a real studio, with an engineer/co-producer with great rock credentials, a man named Kevin Kelly. The result is an album that I consider significant, because I’m showing the rock world new possibilities for an instrument it has occasionally used, but really underutilized. Here are a couple of specific anecdotes.
The first day, we spent a long morning just setting everything up: Each of my two pickups went to both a Headrush modeling pedalboard in stereo and directly to the control board. Then, Kevin came in and meticulously listened to the dulcimer’s acoustic sound while I played, and he chose a couple of mics and the best places to put them. You won’t get this if you just record at home. So my dulcimer had eight channels going into the board. After lunch, we recorded the dulcimer track for Wild Horses, and when I listened back in the headphones, the sound was so rich, I felt like I could never go back to my home stereo again.
For Lucy in the Sky, I wanted the percussion to do things that a drummer couldn’t do — with each chorus going farther out than the previous one, and by the end to “put Lucy out in space.” I brought in world-class beatboxer Chesney Snow. He added nature sounds during the verses, where you’re “in a boat on a river.” For the choruses, the low and high sounds were better in two different mics, so he held one in each hand and bounced back and forth. And at the end of the song, he made backward sounds. It’s cosmic. I like to think the Beatles would have loved my “Lucy.”
The entire recording project was an exercise in collaborative creativity and trust. Here’s a great example. Kevin also was my bassist on the album. For the cover songs, he based his playing on the well-known versions of the songs. But for one of the album’s two original songs, “If I Can’t Get to You,” we negotiated and recorded the bass part in the studio, one phrase at a time. There were moments where each of us thought the other was crazy, but we trusted each other and wound up with, I think, the coolest bass part on the whole record.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Great question! Not from way back when I was first starting, but from my first true rock music gig. I’d recently gone viral with a video of The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Somebody in the New York rock scene heard about it and booked me as part of a program at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Four legit rock bands, and then me finishing the night out.
I set up two dulcimers on stands above two pedalboards. Then, making sure all the cables were connected and all the knobs were in the right places took so long that the sound guy got impatient. Afterward, my breakdown took so long that the bartender got impatient. And lugging all that gear the several blocks from and back to the parking garage was torture.
This really drove home the importance of making my logistics as simple and quick as possible. That’s what motivated me to buy my two Headrushes. They simplify my setup, and they’re easier to carry.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
It’s the second part of the two-part project. First, I recorded and released the album. Now I’m working to publicize it. I have gigs coming up in six states, and am looking to add more.
And, in the near future, I want to make some videos describing my logical, but unconventional, approach to the dulcimer.
You have been blessed with success in a career path that can be challenging. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?
Do what you can to slant the odds in your favor: Networking works. Go to concerts or events, and talk to people. Carry some business cards in your wallet. If you can’t find a venue to book you, find a friend who would be willing to host a house concert. There’s a singer-songwriter named Shannon Curtis who has an excellent book on that. If you don’t know much about the business side of music, take a course or two. In fact, I recently learned that Berklee College of Music offers some basic online courses for free.
In terms of paying the rent and keeping food on the table, I’ve been fortunate. But I’ve seen plenty of musicians who design websites, wait tables, or hold temp jobs. Or, if it fits your schedule, try to get a job in the entertainment or recording industry.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in the music industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Ooh, that’s a tough one for me. I’m a naturally “up” person, and I don’t really burn out. Or at least it hasn’t happened yet.
But here’s one thought. Have a couple of very different projects to work on, and if you’re feeling stuck on one of them, shift to something different.
Also, remember that being a musician isn’t just about playing music. It’s putting together your logistics for out-of-town gigs and doing social media posts and writing email blasts. So make time to play music and to experiment with new musical ideas, and never, ever let the workload eclipse your love for the music.
Thank you for all that. This is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career in The Music Industry” and why? If you can, please share a story or example for each.
1. Know your definition of success. In 2012, I competed in the National Mountain Dulcimer Championship contest. The songs I was playing were over-the-top, truly prizeworthy if I played them clean. Unfortunately, I didn’t play up to my ability. (Long story.) The next day, I bumped into a dulcimer friend, and in our conversation I asked them if they happened to catch the contest. They said, “Yeah, what did you play?” Wow. If this person had seen me play, they would have darn well remembered it. Apparently, I was speaking to one of the judges. I answered, and they said with emphasis, “That was head-and-shoulders the best arrangement in the contest.” I cared more about having great arrangements than about being immaculately clean, so in that moment, I silently declared victory and retired from competitions.
2. Be a big fish in a small pond. There are 30 million guitar players in the US. If I’m in the top 1%, that still means there are 300,000 others at least as good as me. There are probably fewer than 100,000 active fretted dulcimer players in the US, and the vast majority are focused on more traditional repertoires. I’ve found a really cool niche!
3. In the advertising world, there’s a concept called a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. You should have a Unique Selling Proposition that you can express very concisely — an “elevator speech.” I once attended a session where they talked about this, and several musicians volunteered theirs, which were like, “I’m a singer-songwriter from Maine,” or, “I write songs about relationships.” Then I gave mine: “I’m one of the handful of mountain dulcimer players in the country actively promoting the use of that instrument in popular music.” The session moderator leaned forward, smiled big, pointed at me, and said, “I want to see HIS set!”
4. You only have a moment to grab people’s attention. In several of my most successful videos, I did something unusual in the opening moment, such as hitting the face of the dulcimer and letting the sound roar out of the pickups.
A few years ago, my friend, Ted Yoder, was doing his weekly webcast from his backyard. At the beginning, gestured with his arms, apologized for some technical difficulties, waved his arms to relax, introduced the song which he had only played once live, and then played “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” on his hammered dulcimer. That video has been viewed over 100 million times. (In this particular case, after the song his adorable kids brought over an adorable raccoon, which definitely added to the video’s appeal.)
5. I once had the opportunity to ask Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, what enabled him to be so dominant in a game that’s 100% skill and perfect information; his one-word answer was, “Determination.” Similarly, my father was fond of saying, “You can accomplish anything you want to, if you want it badly enough and are willing to pay the price.” My example is how I figured out how to play Scruggs-style bluegrass on the 3-string dulcimer — which is much harder than on a banjo. Developing that skill at 130+ beats per minute took many hours, and arranging specific songs to sound like authentic bluegrass was hard work. As far as I’ve been able to determine, I was the first to do that on a dulcimer.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Am I required to say solving hunger, poverty, or disease — or can we assume that everyone wants those, but they’re too big? Also, I’ll exclude political issues here, because I want to keep both halves of the audience engaged.
Right now, I think it’s important for people to engage with each other in ways where they can see each other’s humanity and not be pulled apart by ideologies. That’s one I know how to help on.
A 3-string dulcimer has half as many strings as a guitar. And a typical dulcimer has frets that only correspond to the notes in a scale play one or two useful extras, so if you choose the right song, you can play the melody or the chords or both while hardly having to think. The mistake notes aren’t even on the instrument! So I believe that fretted dulcimers should be known to the general public the way that ukuleles and guitars are known to the public. I believe that dulcimers are the more logical first stringed instrument, and therefore, there ought to be millions of kids begging their parents for a dulcimer for their next birthday.
Because dulcimers are easier to play, it would give kids more of a sense of accomplishment and creativity. And I believe that dulcimers can be an instrument for collaboration and sharing. When you’re playing music with someone, you’re communicating on a musical level and a human level, and as long as you stay away from charged songs, it can break down barriers between people.
I believe that if dulcimers were widespread, that would be good for the world.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
When I was in my teens, my father gave me his copy of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” This won’t be a pithy quote, but the first chapter opens with the stories of several notorious Prohibition-era gangsters and says that many of them thought they were actually doing good things for the public. He quotes the warden of Sing Sing prison: “Few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their antisocial acts even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all.”
When I see or hear about somebody behaving in ways that might seem harmful or cruel, I try to imagine what might motivate them to believe that it’s actually a good thing. Not condoning, just trying to understand.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I’ll go big with this: Taylor Swift. I admire the way she understands and does wonderful things for her fans — having her parents give front row tickets to excited fans in the nosebleed seats … stalking superfans online and buying them personalized holiday presents … Yesterday I saw a video where she was riding down the street and spotted a girl wearing a t-shirt from her show the night before, so she stopped the car and called the girl over to thank her and pose with her for a selfie. I admire the way she sometimes takes on social issues in her songs. I appreciate how she has stood up for musical artists’ rights, including the massive undertaking of rerecording her early albums. I love the care she puts into planning her performances. And, yes, I like her music, too.
And she’s written at least one song, “Nothing New,” on a dulcimer, so I know she plays. As I said, it’s so much easier for first-time musicians to play something that sounds good and self-validating on a 3-string dulcimer than on a 6-string guitar — if Taylor were to include a dulcimer in her stage shows, I can’t imagine how many more young people would be motivated to have their own first successes at playing music.
How can our readers continue to follow your work online?
Website: www.SamTheMusicMan.com
Bandcamp for CDs and downloads: edelstondulcimer.bandcamp.com/album/making-waves
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Sam.Edelston.Music
Instagram: www.instagram.com/contemporarydulcimer
Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/3XX4KKjlWlMtFvnb58urM9
Streaming platforms: Edelston & Dulcimer
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@ContemporaryDulcimer
This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
Sam Edelston On 5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career in The Music Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.