Dusty Strings

Dusty Strings in Seattle is an acoustic-instrument shop, school, and gathering place for folk and acoustic musicians. In this interview, a staff member discusses the local scene, musical learning, and the instruments that connect the store to music history.

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Interview with Dusty Strings

Dusty Strings is known for beautiful acoustic instruments — harps and hammered dulcimers you build yourselves — as much as for music. How do records and instruments live together under one roof?

We don’t sell records at Dusty Strings, but several of our staff members have worked, or currently work, at record shops in the Seattle area. Shoutout to Sonic Boom and Jive Time! Recorded music is still a driving factor in getting people curious or excited about learning an instrument.

Our co-founder, Ray Mooers, was inspired to build a hammered dulcimer by hearing a live performance; pretty quickly, though, it was the network of artists on small folk record labels that connected him to other people with similar goals, including the late great Sam Rizetta, founding member of the band Trapezoid and fellow dulcimer builder. Sam and Ray compared notes and collaborated on a bunch of early dulcimer designs that kicked off a creative explosion in the early days of the business. We have copies of some Trapezoid LPs on display!

You're in Fremont, a Seattle neighborhood with its own creative streak. What role does the shop play in the local folk and acoustic scene, and who's coming through?

We see a pretty diverse cross section of customers, but lots of them will fall into a few general categories: folks getting started in learning an instrument, either through renting, taking private lessons or group classes with the music teachers in our school, or working with our expert staff to choose their first instrument; experienced players in town who come in regularly to get their instruments serviced, check out the newest inventory, or attend our free jam sessions; or travelling pros who stop in because they’ve heard of our reputation and want to experience the shop for themselves. Recently, we’ve had folks like Men At Work, Joe Henry, John Pizzarelli, stop in the shop. There are so many! I don’t love name dropping, because some pro players prefer to not deal with all the attention and autographs and stuff. We’re not the kind of shop to make celebrities pose with us for pictures or anything, and we try to let them have some privacy and just treat them like people.

But sometimes, we can’t help but get excited if it’s an artist that’s had a big impact or influence on us. Not too long ago, Doug Pettibone was in the shop, on tour with Lucinda Williams. His playing is a huge inspiration to a lot of us who work in the shop; the sounds he got, and tasteful but raw playing, on “World Without Tears” were really a turning point for me in how I approached guitar playing, and music-making in general. Doug was very obliging with his time, really a gentleman, and it was a truly memorable afternoon he spent with us.

Do you carry vinyl alongside the instruments, and what kinds of records feel right in a shop like this?

We don’t sell records, but Seattle has a wealth of great record shops.

We don’t want to compete with them! Just a block up the street is Jive Time, a local institution. Years before working at Dusty Strings, I worked at the original Sonic Boom location in Fremont, practically next door to us. I worked in the record shop but spent my lunch breaks in Dusty Strings playing ukuleles and dobros. I got to know the staff at Dusty Strings and, after years of working at Sonic Boom’s current store in Ballard, those same folks invited me to join on the team here. Easy Street has also had a long history and devoted following, and hosted tons of great in-store performances just like Sonic Boom.

Folk and acoustic music runs deep here. What's the local scene like, and how does the shop fit into it?

Seattle has really great scenes for Bluegrass, old-time, and Irish/Celtic music. There’s a pub a block up the street from us, Shawn O’Donnell’s, that hosts Irish sessions a few times a week, and there’s a lot of crossover with our school, customers, and teachers. Each neighborhood in Seattle has its own scene and nightlife, and Ballard to our west has a great Americana scene with venues like the Tractor Tavern for touring acts, and Conor Byrne for local groups, Bluegrass jams, and a popular open mic.

We’re the main store in town for acoustic instruments: guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, etc., plus harps and hammered dulcimers. No violins though! But we’re a natural hub for the folk music communities, and we do what’s within our means to serve their needs. We’ve got strings for your gig tonight, a teacher to help you brush up for your recital, an associate to help find the right songbook for tunes at the next jam.

Do you host classes, sessions, or events — and what do those bring to the place?

Absolutely! In my mind, those things all feed into each other. Selling instruments isn’t our end goal, it’s really about helping people experience music-making: enjoying that process of songwriting or jamming or performing, or to just have fun making cool sounds!

The instruments (and books, and amps, and…) are just the tools; but classes, sessions, concerts, those are experiences, and that’s really the part that is impactful in someone’s life. We’ve got classes for beginners, like Wes Weddell’s Beginning Mandolin class, or master classes with touring pros like Pierre Bensusan’s fingerstyle guitar workshops. Right now we’re planning our Open House, an annual party in December that has free concerts, cookies, hot beverages, and more, as sort of a thank-you party for our supporters and friends. It’s great to see the results of people incorporating music into their lives: yeah, there are famous folks who bought an instrument here that they’re playing on huge stages, and that’s wonderful. But, there are also parents who took some lessons so they could have family sing-alongs with their kids. Those experiences can shape a person’s life for the better in a small, everyday kind of way that adds up to a lifetime of memories.

Someone comes in curious about learning an instrument and leaves wanting to hear more. What record do you point them to?

This often takes the form of steering people to some representative recordings of a type of instrument they’re not super familiar with, but curious about.

Thinking about picking up the banjo? Do you want to play Bluegrass style or clawhammer? That’s a hard question to answer if you’re new to the banjo world, but if you listen to Earl Scruggs playing Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and Abigail Washburn playing Backstep Cindy, you’ll hear the difference easily. Someone curious about dobro, I might steer them towards anything by Tut Taylor, or Jerry Douglas’ playing in Union Station with Allison Krauss. Norman Blake, Doc Watson, Tony Rice, and Clarence White are all frequent suggestions for guitar playing around here. John Reischman’s work with the Jaybirds is a great choice to show off some tasteful mandolin playing, but of course David Grisman and Chris Thiele are great at demonstrating what a mandolin can do too. One beloved recording that I don’t get to recommend much because it’s so niche is Edgar Meyer’s “Uncommon Ritual”. I remember stumbling across it in a used bin at a record shop I worked at in my late teens, and it was definitely one of the most important albums that kindled an interest in acoustic music for me. I remember thinking it was like if Dave Brubeck and Aaron Copland got together and did chamber music, and I loved it immediately. Admittedly, it’s not for everyone!

What's the most surprising or memorable instrument — or record — that's come through?

The instruments that are most memorable to me are the kind that connect us with our history in an illuminating way. I’m thinking of things like the Knutsen harp guitars that we have on display as part of our museum collection. Chris Knutsen built custom guitars in the greater Seattle area in the early 1900s. He had some “different” ideas about building instruments, and came out with all these radical designs with extra strings and extra necks.

He built at a few different locations around Puget Sound, but he was established in Seattle during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, which was kind of a World’s Fair. The Hawaiian presenters at the expo had a huge impact on him, and it was largely because of this expo and the one in San Francisco that Hawaiian music became a huge fad in America.

See, this was before commercial radio, and it was still the early days for recorded music, and all of a sudden these exotic sounds were accessible in people’s living rooms via records for the first time, and Hawaiian music caught on like wildfire. It’s easy to forget the impact that Hawaiian music had on the US, but it was a huge craze, and slide guitar influenced popular music for a long time, showing up in country music, western swing, blues, it was everywhere! The pursuit to make the instrument louder, for bigger audiences, led to the invention of resonator guitars in the 1920s, and then later electric pickups and guitar amplifiers in the 40s.

Rock & Roll wouldn’t have been possible without the advances in music instrument technology that got started by the Hawaiian slide guitar. And one of the first people to make a dedicated Hawaiian-style lap slide guitar stateside was Chris Knutsen, this little-known instrument building wizard in Seattle. We have four instruments built by him on display in the store, which I think is more than they have at the MoPop museum downtown! Another early pioneer (and Hawaiian music fan) was Seattle’s Paul Tutmarc, making electric instruments years before Leo Fender did.

For someone who's never been in, what should they know before their first visit?

It can be hard to park in our neighborhood. Public transportation is pretty good in Seattle; we’re right on a few bus lines, and a major bicycling thoroughfare, so those are good options if you don’t need to drive. Also, we have an affordable rental program, so if you’re visiting town and need an instrument for a week or whatever, we have you covered. Just call in advance to make sure we have one in stock.

After all these years in Fremont, what keeps people coming back to a shop like this?

I think it’s different for different folks.

Some people come in weekly to check out the latest used mandolins; others come for regular events like our monthly Irish session. I think our reputation for quality and integrity is ultimately responsible for our success; people know that if they buy an instrument here, used or new, we’ve done our best to get it repaired to a high standard, and playing great. We’ve researched the market to make sure it’s a fair value; we take the time to listen and really find out what will help meet a customer’s goals. Sometimes the answer is to not buy something!

Sometimes folks are surprised to hear one of us say, “no, you don’t need a new guitar, let me adjust the one you have so it plays how you want” or “actually, you should put off purchasing until you’ve taken a few lessons; let’s look at a rental so you can see if you even like playing banjo.” That’s the kind of advice I wish I’d gotten when I was starting! I think it’s that considerate approach to helping people that makes it feel more like a community, like people supporting each other, than just a store.

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Last updated: 2026-10-16

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