Ionian DAA vs AAD convention
03/01/2010

It’s confusing. For many, many years I’ve referred to the Ionian tuning on dulcimer as AAD but the convention now seems to be DAA. So I’ve adopted DAA as my label for the Ionian mode on dulcimer, simply to conform.

To be clear, weather you call Ionian AAD or DAA, this is how I tune the instrument: The first /chanter string is tuned to A, the middle string is tuned to A and the third/bass string is tuned to the D below. I hope this clears things up.