severnayazemlya:

There are two major differences between the American mountain dulcimer and its European predecessors – the scheitholt, the langspil, the langeleik, the epinette des Vosges, and so on.

First: all strings are fretted on the mountain dulcimer. The European box zithers tend to leave the lower strings as drones. (This isn’t to say that the mountain dulcimer is never played as a melody/drone instrument rather than a chorded instrument – it can be, if you put it in bagpipe (Ddd) or Galax (ddd) tuning, instead of the common tunings (DAA or DAd). But the lower strings have frets as well.) 

Second: nobody bows the mountain dulcimer. There’s some evidence that it used to be bowed, but that’s not done anymore, where by “not done anymore” I mean “not done anymore except the guy in the video invented the thing in the video, the bowed dulcimer, as a separate instrument”.

(I met him once. He had apparently built his own guitar – a Russian-style guitar with seven strings – and he talked about getting pissed upon seeing guitars that didn’t show evidence that the high frets were used, because, he said, it’s a pain in the ass to put those frets in. He’s right. It is very much a pain in the ass. I wonder if fretboards could be 3D printed without adversely affecting the sound of the instrument.)