Wesley S -

Simple "slide dulcimer" produces virtually no sound. There is no "bridge" on the usual fretted dulcimer to feed the vibrations from the string into the soundboard so that something is heard. The sound has to go through the fret to get to the soundboard. If you're between frets, and the string isn't pressed down against at least one fret, you have to supply another mechanical path from string to fingerboard.

The two nuts that hold the string at the two ends of the dulcimer are fairly inefficient at getting the string vibrations into the sound board. Both of them together, in a reasonably well built dulci, conduct the open string vibrations about as well as one nut and one fret does for notes on partial strings. Take away either the fret or the nut, on the active part of a partial string, and it's as though someone stuffed a rag on it.

As described above, if you're using a noter, you can just touch the noter to both string and fingerboard. Using some other kind of slide/bottle you would also need to tip the slide to contact the fingerboard. If you're "fingering" as I believe leeneia does, any position between frets will be virtually silent, or at least much less loud than the normal fretted notes adjacent to your "slide" notes.

I've seen some dulcimers built with bridges, and if the bridges actually worked as intended (the ones I've seen didn't really seem to), you could play "bottle dulcimer" or "slide dulcimer" perhaps with some success; but on the ordinary kind it's not very musical.

John