OK, so I really should be practicing, but I have been thinking about decorating one of my banjo heads for a while. For a long time, I thought about doing something completely abstract, maybe a Celtic knot, or a tree line around the edge of the head. But ultimately, I was influenced by the writing […]
I just bought this banjo on Craigslist. It appears to be a decent instrument, and sounds pretty good. But it doesn’t have any identifying marks on it that I can find. The guy I bought it from couldn’t really tell me anything about it, just that he had had it for about five years. It […]
I wanted to build or buy a mute that really worked well, and would, at the same time, be easy to install and remove. A towel stuffed in the back of the banjo and held in with the resonator is extremely effective, but isn’t easy to install and remove. Not only do you have to […]
I haven’t gotten to the point of actually needing/using a capo, but I wanted to be ready. So I found a cheap capo on Amazon for just $2.50 with free shipping. It came straight from China, so it took a couple of weeks to get here. But outside of the spring being a little heavy, […]
So, I’m in San Diego for work. I started looking for banjos for sale, and I found that the Deering Factory is in San Diego, not 15 miles from me. I decided to take a tour, which was cool. But what I wasn’t expecting was that Deering had made a batch of Goodtime banjos with […]
I’ve been having problems with owncloud syncing properly. I keep getting “connection closed,” “operation canceled” errors. I finally figured out something that works for me: I go into the client and change the download bandwidth from “No limit” to 99999 KBytes/s. Apparently, there’s some niggling bug that this works around. The limit can be set […]
This is an example of the kind of playing I aspire to. I went to the monthly jam of the Dallas Bluegrass Jam MeetUp group this past Wednesday. The group couldn’t have been nicer or more talented. This is Earl’s Breakdown, featuring Bob Carabbio, but with everyone (except me!) joining in and playing some great […]
I’ve been practicing my rolls since I started playing, and I had a bit of a break through yesterday. I was watching my seven hundredth intstructional video, and doing a roll at the same time. I realized after a minute that I was doing a forward-backward roll (3-2-1-5-1-2-3-1) without even thinking about it. I had […]
This is my first time recording myself, so I can go back and check my progress. I’m playing Cripple Creek, basically the first song I learned (if you don’t count a lick from Duelling Banjos and a bit of Ode To Joy).
I built this server a while back primarily to have a platform to play with web technologies on. I finally decided that since I’ve taken up the banjo, I should write about my interest in the banjo, and my progress in learning to play. So, that’s what I’m doing!