Andy Chase

To quote a friend's recent weblog entry,

"Humans are animals."

This was not said in, nor am I quoting it in, a breathless, moralistic context... I'm just an observer who's spent more of my life watching people's little social games than participating in them.

The other day, I was in downtown Northampton. At the main intersection they have replaced all of the pedestrian walk signal buttons with these optical doodads that you trip with your thumb instead of pushing a button. (Clever; nothing mechanical to wear out after getting pushed hundreds of times a day.)

It so happens that when you trigger this optical sensor, the device also emits an electronic chirp... presumably to let blind people know they hit it.

A group of three teenage boys reached the intersection, and when that thing chirped it totally blew their minds. They each had to make the thing chirp several times, and one of them decided that it would be really cool if he stood there and pushed that button over and over and over and over and over. Then he discovered that he could do it even faster if he used his elbow. He would have kept going if a woman hadn't stuck her head out of Sweeties and told him to cut it out.

Ten minutes later when I was ready to cross the intersection in the other direction, I watched a group of three teenage girls doing pretty much the same thing.

Then as I drove back to the office I watched a Very Important Monkey as she drove through the stop sign at the three way, no-light intersection near the industrial park without so much as slowing down. I would say people do that about 20% of the time at that intersection. Another 50% slow down without stopping, and I'm among the 30% who think that the big red STOP sign is more of an imperative than a vague suggestion for other people.

Like my friend, I am also quick to admit that I'm sure I exhibit plenty of monkey behavior too; I'm not claiming superiority over anyone. I don't know if I even have a point, other than that people are monkeys.

Tenor #1: Profiled Fingerboard
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Although I saved about thirteen bucks by buying a rosewood guitar fretboard blank, I didn't appreciate how thick 1/4" would look on the relatively skinny tenor banjo neck. Next time I'll either spring for the 3/16" ebony from Stewmac, or see if I can find a 3/16" rosewood blank elsewhere.

Because the fingerboard is so thick, I decided to take a fair amount of additional wood off of the neck.

The nice thing about my shureform is that it removes wood quickly. The dangerous thing about my shureform is that it removes wood quickly.

Finally, I reached the point where it seemed like I really need the fingerboard in place before final shaping and sanding, so I took the plunge and cut the fingerboard to shape.

It looks like this will actually be an 18-fret tenor when all is said and done; my original calculations for the neck length were based on the position of the bridge on the 10 inch pot. It didn't occur to me to check the fret placement at that point, so it wasn't until I trimmed the fingerboard to size that I realized that there is just barely too little room for fret 19.

I'm not particularly upset... If I ever get proficient enough on tenor banjo that I actually need one with 19 frets, I will probably be happy to buy (or make) one.

Gluing the fingerboard on will be the scariest part of the operation so far. If the frets aren't absolutely perpendicular to the axis of the neck, playability will be seriously impaired.

For tonight, I will just bask in the satisfaction of how good the fretboard looks resting on the neck.

This is mentioned in the Velocity User Guide, but not very explicitly: If you need to perform an arithmetic operation on a Velocity variable, that variable must have been created as an integer.

What this means if you're passing a HashMap of parameters to the Velocity engine is that you need to pass in an instance of the Integer class. Otherwise, the expression will evaluate to null and the variable will remain unchanged. (So if you pass the String "1" into velocity and then try to increment it in a loop, it will never change.)

If I had to guess how much time I've put into this tenor banjo, it would not actually be very much compared to the number of weeks that have passed... maybe 15 hours altogether. Today was the first time in about a month that I've managed to find a number of consecutive hours to work on it, and I got a tremendous amount done.

In the end I decided to use the full 2 inch width of veneer. In an attempt to avoid ironing directly against the edge of the drumhead, I first tried ironing the veneer agains a length of parchment paper. My theory was that the glue would melt without sticking, and I would be able to peel it up and apply it directly to the drum.

That might have worked if I had planned to apply the veneer in two lengths, but on my first try I went for the full 31.42 inch length. (Hey high school geometry slackers: ? × the 10" diameter of the drum rounds up to 31.42 inches. Yes, you will use this stuff in real life.)

31 inches proved to be too long to manage with the parchment paper technique; the glue wouldn't have stayed hot long enough to iron the whole length at once, and there was no good way to apply it gradually. In the end I decided to iron directly against the outside of the drum, avoiding the staples and head material at the top 1/4 inch.

The only problem there was that the presence of the staples made the veneer want to go on in a very gradual spiral, since the surface wasn't perfectly flat. By the time I got halfway around the circumference of the drum, the edges were out of whack. I wound up cutting the veneer in half, so there will be two seams: one where the neck attaches, and one where the tailpiece attaches. Even so, the veneer didn't go on as smoothly as I would have liked. There are a few uneven spots where I'll have to go back and try and re-iron and smooth it down, but I don't know how well that will work.

My friend Charlie appears in Nancy Rica Shiff's Odder Jobs, a collection of photographs of unusual occupations. Charlie plays the Theremin:

Photograph is © Nancy Rica ShiffI was lucky enough to see Charlie perform a few times before moving away from Los Angeles... he is one of the best! Theremin has been on my list of instruments to try someday for almost as long as banjo... in fact, for a while I expected I'd buy a Theremin first. There is still a MoogMusic Etherwave Kit out there with my name on it.

Tagged:

• theremin

Porch Picking
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

It was mild enough this weekend to reclaim the porch, somewhat.

Not quite mild enough to get any picking done, though.

Tagged:

• banjo
• spring
• summer

Well, for all of my bluster a week and a half ago, I haven't really gotten on track with my three-finger banjo practice. I've been playing almost every day, but still in a fairly unfocused manner.

I first went back to the Scruggs book, thinking I'd work my way through exercise by exercise, learning The Official Way To Play Banjo so I'll have a good foundation wherever I go next. There are some good exercises building up to the arrangement of Cripple Creek from Flatt & Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Banjo album, but as Steve Martin will tell you, you reach a point where you really don't want to play Cripple Creek any more. It was the first song I learned in the clawhammer style four years ago, and one of the first I learned in the Scruggs style two years ago. I'm kind of tired of playing it, especially knowing that even if I work on it until I can play the Scruggs breaks impeccably, anyone else I play with is going to be sick of that song, too.

Last week I got an arrangement of 8th of January for my guitar class, a tune that burrowed its way deep into my head and demanded to be practiced on guitar, sapping some of my banjo energy. However, I got to tinkering one night last week and put together a surprisingly easy melodic-style arrangement of the tune for 5-String banjo, in open C tuning capoed up two frets (aDAC#E.) (Side note: Tabledit is an invaluable tool for this.)

The thing I find with melodic arrangements on banjo is that they are intellectually cool, but they just feel like the most ass-backwards way to go about playing a melody on a stringed instrument; when playing an instrument with a flat pick the progression is clear: play up the frets for one position, then move up to the next string, repeat. When playing melodic-style on banjo, you're often doing things like playing an open, higher string then playing a lower string fretted up at the 5th or 7th fret, then jumping up two strings and doing the same thing. This lets the melody ring smoothly while picking with three fingers, and once you get it down the notes fall into the right place but it's incredibly difficult to "feel" what the next note is when it's 7 frets away on a different string.

Single-string, or Don Reno style is a little bit better, but picking down with the thumb and up with the index finger feels silly and unnatural... especially when you know how natural it feels to play the same type of passage with a flat pick.

For example, here is the tablature for a G scale as you would play it single-string style:

D|----------------0---2---4---5---|4---2---0-----------------------|

B|--------0---1-------------------|------------1---0---------------|

G|0---2---------------------------|--------------------2---0-------|

D|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|

g|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|

Even if you don't play a stringed instrument, the progession is visually clear. Here's the same exact scale in the melodic style:

D|----------------0-------4-------|4-------0-----------------------|

B|--------0-----------5-----------|----5-----------0---------------|

G|0-----------5-------------------|------------5-----------0-------|

D|----7---------------------------|--------------------7-----------|

g|----------------------------0---|--------------------------------|

In both cases, it seems like you're making extra work for yourself. I know the reason behind both styles is that it still leaves you with the ability to play the three-finger rolls and pinches that make Scruggs style banjo so distinctive, but it's hard to get a feel for it.

I was fooling around with some basic G major and G major pentatonic scales in both Reno and melodic styles tonight, and realized that much of my frustration lies with the fact that you can memorize how to play a scale, but not really know what you're playing; carefully arranged melodic passages fall apart if you miss a note or a beat, and unless you really know the scale and its relationship to the fretboard you don't have a hope of getting back on track if you flub it.

And needless to say, knowing the theory behind scale construction and knowing the fretboard is absolutely essential to improvisation.

So to become a well-rounded three-finger style banjo player I need to work on technique, (which will hopefully be a byproduct of rote repetition) and I need to really learn my instrument, not just how to memorize songs on it.

This is not a really a new revelation; I've had my copy of Edly's Music Theory for Practical People for two years now, and I have gleaned a lot from it in terms of calculating the I-IV-V chords of a particular key in my head on the fly, transposing tunes, building scales and chords, et cetera... but I've used the book more like a reference than a study. I need to know these things cold without consulting a book, and I need to know how they map to the banjo fretboard, forward and backward with my eyes closed.

I should probably also stop putting it off and learn to read standard musical notation. This is not exactly fun stuff, but if nothing else it is the sort of stuff that makes it easy to mark progress.

Beach Access
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Someday it will warm up and turn green. In the meantime I will gaze at this photo.

Tagged:

• maine
• pinepoint
• beach
• summer
• photo