THOUGHTS OF THE DAY
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June 7, 2010 MY INSTRUMENT COLLECTION
Ever since I was a little kid, I've been surrounded by instruments. My parents always had a significant collection of stringed instruments hanging on the wall, and I grew up listening to my mother playing piano and my sister playing harp, so music has always been a big part of my life. My grandparents traveled around the world and usually brought back some of the local instruments from wherever they went. As I grew up and began to travel, I also started acquiring instruments from the places I visited, and when my grandparents died, I inherited their collection as well. As an adult, my instrument collecting became more focused, and more extensive, so by now, I have acquired several hundred different instruments from all over the world. Visitors really seem to enjoy viewing the collection, so I thought it would be a good thing to share some of it on YouTube. At some point, my plan is to post a photo gallery as well.
March 17, 2010
New YouTube Videos for St. Patrick's Day:
March 12, 2010
New YouTube Videos:
Turkey in the Straw on mountain dulcimer and Leksands Brudmarsch on English concertina
March 5, 2010 LOST IN TRANSLATION
Do you remember the old game "Telephone" where one person whispers a phrase to the next person who whispers it to the next and so on down a line until it reaches the end. The last person then speaks the phrase out loud, and then the first person announces the original phrase and everyone laughs at the remarkable change it has made. This game is even more funny if it is done with a language translation chain. I know of one case where it was played with a joke which went through about 7 languages and managed to pick up an extraneous goat by the time it got to the final translation. Travels With Dulcimers was picked up by a Polish website and the final track, Trip to Durro/ Boy in the Gap ended up renamed as Trip this Sorghum/ Page in the Gaping Spectator.
Aren't computers wonderful?!
New YouTube Videos:
Holmes Fancy on mountain dulcimer and Västgöta Sväng on English concertina
February 26, 2010
New YouTube Videos:
Old Hen She Cackled on mountain dulcimer and The Mermaid on English concertina
Today's Addled Adage:
"A Rising Tide Runs Deep"
February 19, 2010
New YouTube Videos:
Båtsman Däck on mountain dulcimer and Eklunda Polska on English concertina
February 14, 2010 LEARNING A NEW TUNE
One of my friends asked me how I learn a tune. That got me to thinking... Usually I learn a tune from someone by listening to it enough times so that it sticks in my head. If I'm playing with someone, or in a jam session, that usually means about ten times through the tune. That's generally enough for me to know it reasonably well. If I really like a tune, I'll make a note of the name, and then I'll ask to play it again at some later date. This next time it generally comes back quickly (maybe one or two times through). After that, if I like it enough to go home and play it by myself, I can recall it at will, or maybe it will just pop into my head while I'm doing something else. At that point, I consider that I know the tune. Some tunes I'll learn from an old record or a CD. Those I've usually heard enough so that they're already in my head, and I could easily play them in a jam session, but I have to sit down and work out an arrangement to see if I really want to work it up to solo performance level. I almost never learn tunes from a book (although I will occasionally learn a song from a book if I think there's something particularly interesting about the text). I will, however, use books to look up a tune I played with someone else and decided I like enough to learn.
New YouTube Videos:
Cluck Old Hen on mountain dulcimer and Barkbrödlåten on English concertina
February 6, 2010 SIGN LANGUAGE
There are those times and places where you just hope you have a camera to capture an image or a memory. I have a pad of notes of funny signs and juxtapositions that I've run across over the years like the truck in Florida which advertised "Fresh Salt Water (call 876-FISH)", or the sign on the "Bon Voyage Travel Agency" which announced "we've moved", or the Ichiban Chinese Restaurant which existed briefly in Fort Lauderdale. Today I was fortunate enough to have my camera when I passed this gem at the local school for the blind:
February 4, 2010 ACRONYMS
The advent of texting and internet messaging (IMing) seems to have created a plethora of new acronyms which are totally baffling when taken out of context. This has spilled over into regular speech and every field seems to be flooded with its own set of acronyms. On Facebook, I wrote about my latest belt promotion in BJJ (Brazilian jiu-jitsu), and one of my dulcimer friends was speculating as to what BJJ stood for. After I told him, he remarked about the problem with acronyms and gave the example DWFT. Having no clue what he referred to, I dutifully looked it up on Google, and came up with Discrete Wavelet Frame Transform which wasn't much help at all. He found that amusing and ended his message with "Done work for today".
About a month ago I put this message on the Dulcimer list in response to someone's baffling reference to what seemed like 3 random letters:
"Pardon the NDR (non-dulcimer related) message, but anyone else here a member
of SAT? SAT (Society Against TLAs) wants to put an end to widespread use of
TLA (Three letter acronyms). They're totally incomprehensible unless you are
ITL (in the loop) and lead to EMC (endless mass confusion). They seem to have
been around for a VLT (very long time), but since the rise of the internet,
they've become IYF (in your face) wherever you look. So please join me and
PAE (put an end) to this UMN (ubiquitous modern nuisance).
Of course this is just IMHO (in my humble opinion) and sent with TFIC (tongue
firmly in cheek)... Thank goodness I have nothing against four letter
acronyms. ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing)."
Today's Addled Adage:
"You never miss the water in mid stream"
BTW (by the way), for those who are interested, I'm a third degree black belt in judo, and I'm now a purple belt in BJJ.
A picture taken in London in 2000. Thai Square is a Thai restaurant. I loved that it was located in Norway House.
February 1, 2010 RETURNING TO BLOGGING
First MySpace and then Facebook pretty much took over my blog time allowance, but I'm going to make an effort to get back to blogging. (We'll see how long it lasts this time.) I recently saw the movie, 'Julie and Julia' which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it has sort of inspired me try blogging once more.
I have really enjoy giving dulcimer workshops recently in Cincinnati and Oklahoma City. It feels extremely rewarding to travel to a city where a bunch of folks want to be immersed in an intense learning situation for a day and then giving a concert to a small appreciative audience. I enjoy giving festival workshops too, but being the only teacher for the day allows me to get to know the participants and help them learn in a more focused way than at large festival workshops where there are other distractions.
After about two years of work, Playing A Round with Dulcimers is finally out! HOORAY! At first it was just going to be a book of tablature with an accompanying CD, but the CD really took on a life of its own. The amount of effort trying to work out truly great musical arrangements for the rounds ended up being much more challenging than I expected. And recording from 3 to 7 parts for each round introduced me to multi-tracking issues I hadn't given much thought to in my previous CD's. As I recorded more and more of the rounds, they became tighter and more rhythmically precise and my sound engineer finally got a handle on efficient editing. I'm sure it was as much of a learning experience for him as it was for me.
Here's a new Addled Adage for those who have patiently waited :-)
"A penny saved is soon parted"
Hey!, did you know that Batman lives in Austin?
ALPHABETICAL ARCHIVE OF ADDLED ADAGES:
"A bird in hand makes waste."
"A fool and his money is a friend indeed."
"A penny saved is soon parted"
"A rising tide runs deep"
"Visitors and dead fish make strange bedfellows."
"Where there's a will, there's death and taxes."
"You never miss the water in mid stream"