Andy Chase

Damn and blast! My new banjo has not arrived yet!

I know it's terrible of me to have gone from wide-eyed wonderment to spoiled-child impatience in less than a week, but this is the banjo that I didn't expect to have for another few years at least; take three+ years of low-level longing and anticipation and cram it into two weeks and you can't help but wind up in 8 year old on Christmas Eve mode.

Interestingly, I just dug up this fragment from the 'Draft' pile, originally written on 2004-06-23. I don't remember why I never finished it, but I do remember the frustration that spawned it:

"It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools", so the saying goes, but dammit, you can't do good work with the wrong tool for the job either.

I need a new banjo. I'm getting into the 3-finger style, and my plunky open-back banjo just doesn't cut it. It's fine for frailing, where plunk is generally desirable, but it lacks the bright, cracking sound of a good resonator banjo... as my 3-finger playing improves marginally, it's becoming more apparent just how integral that resonator sound is to the style. (At least, to the style as I would like to sound when playing it.)

I am trying not to place too much faith in this new banjo's ability to contribute to my abilities on the instrument, but I have no doubts about its ability to contribute to my motivation!