Andy Chase

It's fashionable these days for software to go out to the internets and check to see if a new version of itself has been released. When a new version is available, the first thing you get upon opening the program is a supremely annoying popup window saying "A new version has been released! Would you like to visit our web site to download the latest version?" and some buttons: "Yes", "Not Now", and maybe a "Remind Me Later". Sometimes you'll see a "stop asking me" checkbox, which often doesn't do a blessed thing.

The problem is one of timing; when I open up whatever program it is I want to use, it's because I've made up my mind to perform some kind of task - and that task isn't to go to a web site, download an installer or disk image, browse to the file on my hard drive, uncompress it, run an installer, restart the program, read the annoying "What's new in version x.x" message, and then perform the task I wanted to do in the first place.

I like new version notification in concept, but in practice I find myself clicking the "Not Now" button 9 times out of 10. I would probably be much more receptive to the upgrade process if the program hit me with that message when I went to quit, after my task is complete.

Tagged:

• software
• hci

I decided to start on the square hole through the hand drum, where the dowel stick will pass through at the neck joint.

Gaffe number one: I drilled the hole on the opposite side of the rim than I had originally intended; I wanted the Remo graphic to be at the tailpiece end of the instrument; it would have been a little less prominent, and it would also have placed the seam of the cheesy fake walnut veneer around the outside of the drum at the neck joint, hiding it completely. As the saying goes, measure twice, cut once.

I'm not all that upset about it... it won't affect tone in any way, and I'm probably the only person that will notice (or care) about the position of the logo.

I drilled a small pilot hole, then drilled a larger, 1/2" hole. The dowel stick will be about 3/4" at the wide end, so I wanted to be conservative. Next I tried to cut the corners of the hole with a coping saw, but I didn't feel like I had enough control that way. I'll probably finish the hole with files.

Upon drilling through it, I discovered that the drum shell is made of very dense cardboard, like the stuff you usually find in rolls of carpeting. I wonder how Remo mounts the head on these drums.

Beer, anyone?
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Well, I stayed up way too late to do that, but it was fun to brew again and now it's done.

Original gravity for this five gallon batch was 1.044. I pitched the yeast at 87°F... it would have been more like 78, but I had to boil some more water at the last minute to top it off at five gallons. This was the "Theodoric of York's Best Bitter" kit from Beer and Winemaking Supplies in Northampton, Massachusetts.

For future reference: The pre-boiled, frozen/refrigerated water approach was fantastic for getting the wort temperature down rapidly. Anything more than the 2 frozen 2 liters would probably be too effective. However, next time the ice has got to be in something that it will just slide right out of. Trying to cut open a frozen PET plastic soda bottle without contaminating anything is not very realistic, and a bit dangerous.

I only hope that I didn't get too many foreign beasties into the wort as a result of wrestling so much with the frozen bottles before managing to get the ice out of them.

The fermentor is down in the workshop. Hopefully the airlock will be bubbling by morning.

Tagged:

• beer
• brewing
• homebrew
• homebrewing
• zymurgy

I cut out the neck from two pieces of maple 1x3 that I glued up last night; since the tenor neck is a relatively skinny with only 4 strings, I thought I'd be able to get away with a 1.5" wide blank... that was cutting it pretty close, but I think it will be OK in the end. Here I've just glued the peghead ears on (much wider than necessary, but it was easier to just cut another scrap of 1x3 in half than into thirds.)

Observations: I need a jointer plane.

Although not many people are likely to notice, this is pretty much my first public step towards the daydream I've been cultivating for a few years: hanging out my shingle as a luthier.

chaseinstruments.blogspot.com

Tagged:

• lutherie

Tagged:

• zombie
• survival
• meme
• survey

I haven't been playing much over the last few weeks. Not clawhammer banjo, not three-finger banjo, not mandolin, not ukulele.

At a bare minimum I should absolutely be practicing guitar for the group class I'm taking, but I've been lax there as well, and it shows during class.

I think it's a symptom of a few different things. Let me get the easy one out of the way first: Getting home from work late. That's a bit of a cop-out, since I could always set aside some time to practice before work/over lunch/et cetera.

The harder ones are questions of short-term goals:

If I can browbeat myself into religiously devoting at least 30 minutes a day to banjo/guitar/mandolin, what aspects of technique am I hoping to improve?

and long-term goals:

If I'm true to those hypothetical short term goals and spend at least 182.5 hours practicing over the next year, what am I hoping to do with those improvements?

and picking a discipline:

Donald Zepp makes me want to practice clawhammer banjo until I can play like that. Béla Fleck makes me want to practice 3-finger banjo until I can play like that. Chris Thile makes me want to take mandolin lessons.

Pretty much every musical method book I've paged through stresses the importance of setting those short-term goals (be able to play the forward roll at 180bps, be able to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown at full speed), but that sort of assumes you already know what your long-term goals are, even if they're as vague as "playing in a bluegrass band."

My problem is that after almost four years of hanging around the alt.banjo.* groups on usenet and the BanjoHangout web site, I don't think I want to play in a traditional "that ain't the way Earl plays that break, play it right son" bluegrass band - every musical genre has its purists, but compared to my days of comparing notes with other casual rock guitarists, banjo players are insane.

The fact is that I'm not a huge fan of dyed in the wool bluegrass. The nasally, twangy vocals that accompany most acts are like fingernails on chalkboard to me, and there's way too much obsession with "authenticity". There was a long, contentious thread on BanjoHangout a while back that was started by someone complaining about performers at some festival not tucking their shirts in. There are multiple discussion topics about whether it's OK to play the foggy mountain roll using thumb-index thumb-index instead of thumb-index thumb-middle.

Thanks, but no thanks.

On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of the musicians who have outgrown the boundaries of traditional oldtime/bluegrass music without abandoning the instrumentation; Béla Fleck, Tony Rice (guitar), David Grisman (mandolin), Edgar Meyer (bass), and plenty of others... for me it's about the music, not about a concept of 'good old time bluegrass' that's really more of a world view about tradition/simpler times/the-way-things-ought-to-be of which the music happens to be a component.

Setting aside the fact that all of my favorite acoustic musicians are virtuosi and the knowledge that realistically I will probably never, ever approach that level of mastery, my other source of frustration is experiental. I grew up in New England listening to my Parents' 1960s jazz and pop-rock, and my brother's 1970's rock. The only childhood exposure to banjo that I can remember was the guy playing tenor or plectrum at a Shakey's pizza in Maryland in the late 1970's, when I would have been 4 or 5; that planted the banjo seed, but otherwise I grew up with all of the typical cultural cues about banjo as a redneck/hillbilly/country instrument, and because of my absolute loathing of modern country-pop I spent 28 years of my life completely unaware of old-time music and all those great instrumental fiddle tunes. Like a lot of people, it wasn't until I saw O Brother, Where Art Thou? that I became aware of old-time music, and realized to my surprise that I liked it.

That led to the purchase of my first banjo and some lessons, and Béla Fleck's Tales From the Acoustic Planet Volume II: The Bluegrass Sessions was my foot in the door to the world of instrumental bluegrass that eventually led me to take some lessons in the three-finger style, and to acquire a mandolin.

It's been almost four years since I got my first banjo, and I have barely scratched the surface of the oldtime/bluegrass universe... I've still never heard a lot of the 'must have' records, and for every traditional tune I know like Cripple Creek or Old Joe Clark, there are half a dozen I don't. It's not like rock guitar, where 31 years of constant radio and household exposure makes it easy to hack around and bang out some power chords or licks that sound like I know what I'm doing. If I decide I want to learn a new song on banjo, I don't usually have that benefit of having heard the melody so often throughout my life that it's half-learned already. So there's the lack of cultural context... but I'm not going to be too hard on myself when I haven't even been listening to this stuff for four years yet.

The other reason I'm treading water is that I'm trying to go in too many directions at once, and I've been reluctant to settle on an instrument and willfully setting aside the others for a year or two until playing the one instrument is like riding a bike. Again, it's been less than four years and I've been tinkering with two styles of banjo, mandolin, and acoustic guitar... I shouldn't beat myself up over it, but I should make a conscious decision to focus on one thing in a disciplined fashion for a while, and see where it takes me.

Tagged:

• music
• practice
• banjo
• guitar
• mandolin
• ukulele
• frustration