banjoplayinnerd

I suspect I've gone a bit overboard in installing apps on my new phone. At least I'm occasionally getting messages saying I have "insufficient storage" to download and install an update. Of course the message helpfully doesn't tell me what directory or item has insufficient storage so I can go fix the problem, and I am left to various spells and incantations like "clear all of your caches" (fortunately there's an app for that).

I don't suppose I strictly need three chromatic tuners, after all, especially since I really like one of them. Pitchlab was very easy to set up for my banjo and even has several alternate tunings besides the standard gDGBD. Once running it displays five lines representing the strings, and in the background is an annulus that reminds me a little of the Stargate. If a string you are tuning is off by a considerable margin you'll see a bowed line above or underneath the representation of the relevant string with a message, "TUNE UP" or "TUNE DOWN." Once you start getting close the bowed line superimposes itself on the string line and dots start rotating on the annulus. When the rotation stops you see a message that says "IN TUNE" and you're ready to go to the next string.

This beats the snot out of the Snark tuner I clip to my peghead. Not that I think the Snark tuner is bad (it's actually quite good) but I've broken at least one and lost another, I forget to take it off the peghead, my grandson decides to play with it and run down the battery, and on and on. I tend to always have my phone with me, and try to keep it charged, so access to it isn't a problem.

So last night once I got the banjo tuned and had run through a song or two, I decided to try an experiment. The banjo, like the violin and unlike the guitar, has an adjustable bridge. Unlike the violin, it also has frets. That means that due to the physics of how strings make sound, you have to position the bridge close to twice the distance between the nut and the 12th fret for the frets to sound the right notes as you go up the neck. Exactly how close is more art than science; you have to fiddle around and adjust to get it right.

The physics of how the strings produce sound also mean that, due to the tension of the strings on the bridge and the thickness of the strings, the point at which a bridge should be in order to produce an octave at the 12th fret is slightly different for each string. There is a type of bridge called a "compensating bridge" that is designed to compensate for this differential, and that's the kind I have. (I also have a standard, non-compensating bridge somewhere in my banjo junkbox.) Since Pitchlab was working so well to tune the banjo with open strings, I decided to see how well the compensating bridge compensated.

The results were surprising to say the least. The third string came out right on pitch, an octave above the open string, but Pitchlab said the first, second and fifth strings were too high, and the fourth string was too low. Now comes the guesswork. Is the bridge really that far out of adjustment? Did I put it on backwards? Would the straight bridge work better?

Or is Pitchlab just blowing smoke and telling me that the strings are in the wrong octave?

I said at the beginning that maybe I didn't need three different chromatic tuners, but I suppose I should try using them to tune up and check the bridge to see what they say. But if I do, how will I know which of them if any is right?

Maybe I should just get a pitch pipe and tune the darn thing by ear.

When I first got a Windows Phone 7 right after they came out I did what every new phone owner does and set out to customize it. There weren't all that many apps available, but one that had been ported over from either Android or iOS was simply called "Backgrounds" by Stylem Media. It was (still is) an ad-sponsored app that presented possible backgrounds for your phone. Most are pretty but mundane, some are funny, some are spectacular. As I was leafing through the collection and trying a few out, this one caught my eye:



I never got past that. It was so perfect. I made it my lock screen wallpaper and there it stayed for over two years.

In setting up my new Android phone I of course installed Backgrounds in the hope of finding it again. I still haven't found it there (although they do still have some very nice backgrounds and it's fun scrolling through them), but a quick Bing image search found the penguin with the banjo out in the wild. It is now in its place of honor on my phone's lock screen, and while all might not be right with the world, that little portion of it certainly is.

The only minor drawback is that I have a message that scrolls across my lock screen, telling anyone who happens to pick up the phone if I've left it behind in a lavatory or something similar: "If you find me please call my owner's wife at (206) xxx-xxxx". The message is white text against the off-wite background of the picture and a bit hard to read, but not so much that it becomes useless. I'm going to see if I can change the color of the text, but it's not a huge issue.

I got home from work too late to see the oldest granddaughter appear in her play's premiere, so I took the evening off, had a little somethihg that closely resembled supper, and pulled out the banjo and the microphone to see what they could do. You'd think I would have run through one of my own songs, like Crossroads or Dark Lullaby, but I didn't. For reasons that completely escape me Taj Mahal's Fishin' Blues has been my earworm of late, so I did a few practice plunks to figure out a couple of the chords, turned on mic, and away I went.

Here are a few impressions off the top of my head:

1. Damn, the kid is good.

2. Damn, the kid needs to get back into practice.

3. All things being equal, maybe I should not be singing this song in G. The highest note in the song is right at the top of my range and I was straining to hit it. Then again I'm out of practice, I wasn't giving myself the singing support I should have, blah, blah, blah. The song is a natural in G, and I suppose I could capo up the neck to play it in an open C or D, but that has its own problems. Maybe a different tuning? I dunno.

This sound could be perfect for a Seeger-style long neck banjo, which plays in E if not capoed up to normal banjo tuning. However, I have not even researched what such a beast would cost, because (1) buying it for one song would be ridiculous, (2) my wife would probably kick it and me out of the house, and (3) I don't have the money anyway.

(Pete Seeger once told Lee Hays, "Lee, I've got one too many banjos." "Yeah?" said Lee. "How many do you have?" "Two.")

4. You know how your voice sounds different when you listen to a recorded version than the voice you hear inside your head? Yeah. That.

5. Oddly though, the banjo sounds different to me when I listen to a recording of myself playing than when I'm actually playing it. If I was at all worried about it having a sufficiently plunky sound, I need worry no more. Is it because I'm hearing the sound coming out of the back of the banjo rather than what's heading out toward the audience? I dunno.

6. From what I can tell this microphone sounds like it does a pretty good job of accurate sound reproduction. This is good, because – and here's a little secret just between you and me – I've never practiced in front of a microphone. I have very little idea what I sound like to someone sitting out in the audience. Maybe now that I have a mic I can play with my voice a little to see what it can do.

7. The recording has already been deleted. It wasn't worth saving. I didn't even keep the electrons to recycle in future projects.

8. All that being said, the kid has some potential.

9. One of these days? Bandcamp. Maybe. I hope.

So as many of you know, I was the Interfilk guest at Conchord which happened about ten days ago, thanks to the sponsorship of Juliana McCorison and Kathleen Sloane and the other board members at Interfilk. Pre-con planning was a bit chaotic but we finally got all the ducks in a row, I got my ticket and off we went.

The trip out was relatively uneventful, except that due to traffic we got to the airport, bags checked, through security and into the boarding area just in time to board the plane. This would not have been so bad except that we hadn't had any breakfast yet, and I was worried my blood sugar would drop. (Not without cause, as we shall see later.) I had counted on getting breakfast at the airport but there wasn't really time to do so, so I ended up having to pay $7 for a cheese and fruit "plate" to share with my wife. It and a Zone bar did the job well enough until we landed in San Diego, where we were met by Kate Evans, Conchord's guest liaison.

Kate helped us schlep bags out of the terminal and into her SUV. One of the guide rods on the smaller suitcase got bent, making it hard to roll the suitcase. It made me glad they didn't give me any grief about taking the banjo on the plane. It fit very nicely into the overhead compartment.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the Town & Country Resort. It's a very nice hotel and the staff was quite friendly, but one of the first things we learned was that it's a captive hotel. They have about half a dozen restaurants on the premises, but the prices are about what you would expect for a hotel restaurant in Southern California. After checking in and resting up a bit we decided to make the trek to a mall across the light rail tracks, where we were told there was a food court. No need not to, it was a nice sunny pleasant San Diego afternoon and we had lots of time to stop and rest along the way. Good thing too, because looking at the map it looks like we walked the better part of a mile to get to the mall's food court. We had fish tacos and a shrimp burrito at a place called Rio's (I think), after which I had a phone screen with a potential employer. They decided not to move ahead, but I couldn't complain much about having a job interview while sitting outside in San Diego, sipping a soda and watching the passers-by pass by.

The con is a bit of a blur. We got to meet Laura Reynolds, the artist GoH, who does primarily soft sculptures. Hers are much more elaborate than my wife's. We ordered pizza because it was easier and cheaper than anything at the hotel. We ran into some old friends, including Bill Laubenheimer, the guy I shared the COnflikt 5 songwriting prize with, and his wife. Blind Lemming Chiffon was there, as was Heather Dale (of course, since she was the music guest). And I got to hear some fine Southern California filk in the Friday Night showcase. One guy in particular who I'd like to arrange for a couple of performances is Tim Griffin. He does songs about science and math, mostly geared toward children, and performs them in schools. Most of his performances are around the Los Angeles area, since that's where he's from, but if I can persuade enough schools to have him in to make it worth his time, he said he'd be happy to come up. (Did I mention he does this for free? He's organizing a non-profit to coordinate his activities, and hopefully pay him a living wage.) Afterward we retired to the open filk room to run through all of the songs nominated for the Kazoo Awards (25 of them, if I remember right). By the time we got to the last one - which was Tom Smith's Seven Drunken Nights In Space, and which was Conchord's first chance to hear me sing - it was pretty late and I ambled off to bed. I don't know if anyone else stayed up for open filking.

Saturday was the big show! I got to open for Heather!!! (Oh. And Ben.) It was a good crowd and since for the most part they hadn't heard my stuff before, I'm glad they laughed in the right places and figured out to clap along with "You're A Hack." The set list went something like:

You're A Hack
Colour
Batman's Really Cool
The Loneliest Pro At The Con
Ghosts
Dark Lullaby
Roll Down The Water
Half The Battle
Crossroads

Afterward Heather and Ben were their usual awesome selves, followed by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, who were their usual awesome selves. It was a good show and I was happy to be a part of it.

Sunday I sat in on a songwriting workshop Jeff gave. I always learn when I go to these things, even when I'm on the panel (I wasn't this time), and Jeff broke down how he writes his parodies. It was hugely useful, and I hope to put it to good use. Ben did a guitar technique workshop; a guitar is a guitar and a banjo is a banjo, but some things cross over, and it was cool just to hear Ben talk about how he approaches their music. After the official end of the con a bunch of us got together at the hotel's steak house (the only restaurant open on the premises) and chatted and had a good time over dinner, after which we headed back to the hotel for a dead dog filk. The dog finally stopped kicking about 10:30, plenty of time for us to get up to the room, pack our bags and be ready for the red-eye out of SAN.

This has already gotten pretty long, so I think I'll continue the Ballad Of The Amazingly Annoying Return Flight Home in another post.

Yesterday was quite a day and I feel like I actually accomplished something.

The Tooth Of The Matter

Sunday I was sitting in church waiting for services to start and Igor the Younger offered to share a couple of Mike&Ikes his grandma had given him. I took one, thanked him, praised him for sharing, bit down on it and immediately wished I hadn't. Bit down, not praise Igor the Younger. The candy knocked a crown loose off of one of my lower right molars. Luckily my dentist, who is a family friend and attends the same church, was sitting right behind us, took a look and arranged for me to come in yesterday. The bottom line is that he feels like I need a couple of posts in what remains of the molar to get the crown to stay on, but he cemented it on so it would stay in until he could bring me in for the full procedure. I'm grateful that he was able to take care of it quickly. I wasn't in pain - the tooth was root canaled long ago - but my tongue kept scraping against the sharp edge of the remnants of the tooth. It's healing up now but will probably still be a couple of days before the abrasions and lacerations go away.

Shopping For Tools

My daughter very kindly picked me up from the dentist with Igor the Younger in tow, and we stopped off at Walgreen's on the way home to pick up some Spider-Man Band-Aids to take care of some boo-boo or another he had gotten himself into. It was a fun experience as only shopping at Walgreen's with a four-year-old can be. We never got past the toy aisle, where he tried to use his Con Auntie And Grandpa skill. Luckily we both made our Resist Con Job From Four Year Old Who Wants You To Buy A Bag Of Water Balloons roll. We didn't get water balloons (although if the temperature stays up we might just have to), but on the way to the checkout I spotted a little $5 household tool kit with some jewelers' screwdrivers and a couple of other useful gadgets. The water balloons would have been cheaper, but Igor the Younger's is fascinated by tools and this looked like it would be a good addition to his collection. It wasn't until I got to the checkstand that I figured out that this toolkit had both a pair of scissors and a wire snipper, both of which can be very dangerous in a little boy's hands. Especially this little boy By then it was too late, though. He had already seen it and decided it was his. So we went home and he and his scissors helped me open a box that arrived in the mail, cut up some stray pieces of recycling and generally had a good time with the new toy.

Wireless Access Coming Soon!

Several years ago I bought a combination wireless access point and ethernet hub so I could share out our cable modem connection. It turned out to be not exactly what I wanted. Apparently Linksys makes several different kinds of WRT-54g WAP, and the one I bought wasn't the one that runs Linux natively and can be modified and improved. Even so, I put it to work, but it's showing its age and has some frustrating limitations, the lack of modability being one of them. Flakiness is another. Every so often it seems to drop connections or lose power or something, and I have to reset it.

I've wanted to replace it for a long time, but I wanted a specific replacement. I have an HP Vectra computer that's been around long enough to have a "Made For Windows 2000" sticker prominently displayed on the front. It's old and slow and would collapse under the weight of the software if you tried to put any modern GUI-based operating system on it (Linux included), but it's plenty fast enough for my mad scientific purposes.

The Linksys does have one thing going for it, though. It's a purpose-built machine that you can just plug in and go. There's a little configuration involved if you want to do anything fancy on your side of the network (meaning I did some configuration) but not much. Turning the Vectra in to a firewall/router/WAP/DHCP/DNS machine is a do-it-yourself project that involves scouring the Internet, discarding the stuff that was applicable to versions of Linux from six years ago that now would be known as The Hard Way, and making it all work and play nicely together.

I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Server onto the machine over the weekend (an adventure in paleocybernetics I won't bore you with here), gathered the software I needed and started configuring. Some of it was "by the book," er, website, some of it was trial-and-error-and-read-the-logs-and-try-again. Executive summary: Yesterday I turned on the access point package and got my cell phone to connect to the WAP and get an address. This means most of the configuration is done and everything is working the way it should for the packages installed so far. There's still some tweaking to be done, mostly involving security and making the Internet accessible to the machines behind the firewall, but the bulk of it – something I've wanted to do for over a year now – is done. I still have one piece of hardware on order before I can hook everything up, and my plan is to switch out the Linux machine for the Linksys router over the weekend, possibly after everyone has gone to bed Friday night. They'll all want their Internet access on Saturday, and I can't blame them. I would.

And Whaddaya Get? Another Day Older

After I finished up with the WAP, we ate supper and the grandkids settled in to watch a movie with Auntie. I was in the bedroom winding down and getting ready to go to bed, and as I often do I had the banjo in my lap as I did my computer stuff. I was just kind of idly picking at the strings, sounding an open chord, not playing anything in particular, when I hit upon the pattern 5-1-2-3-4. Hmmm. That sounds almost familiar. I tuned the second string down a half step to a B♭, did the pattern again, and yep, it was the opening riff to Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of "Sixteen Tons."

So of course I had to work out the song, which involved figuring out the chords on a banjo that's not tuned the way I usually play it. Luckily the way I remember the song it's only three chords. Rise Up Singing says four, but I usually go with what I hear when I can figure out what it is. Makes it sound "folkier," in my humble opinion. Anyway the base G minor chord was now an open strum and the other two just involved moving the finger fretting the second string up a fret.

There was something missing, though. I mean, I followed Ford's version pretty closely, but as it sometimes does, my ear was telling me to do something different. So just before the last verse ("If you see me comin'") I shifted the key up from G minor to A♭ minor by barring the first fret. That's something I don't often do on a banjo because the fifth string becomes discordant (G against an A♭ chord), but as it turns out I was able to solve that fairly easily. I had been ending each verse by doing a quick attack with a D7 chord on "owe" and then doing "my soul to the company store" a capella, following it up with the "5-1-2-3" riff. Since I have "railroad spikes" on my banjo (a capoing system where you put actual model railroad spikes into the fretboard and capo the fifth string by slipping the string under the spike) I figured out I could hit the chord for "owe", then while singing "my soul to the company store" quickly spike the fifth string at the sixth fret so it would sound an A♭ and be in accord with the new key. Then I did the riff, played a couple of Gm chords, and moved up to A♭m. I think it sounds pretty good.

Anyway that was my day yesterday. Hope you had a good one too.

* Within the hour of my contact with PY3ED, Edenir in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I got a confirmation, so now I have ten "countries" confirmed. Yay! (OK, so technically they're "entities," because let's face it, two of those "countries" are Alaska and Hawaii, but you say potato and I say solanum tuberosum.) At 6960 miles, give or take, it's not quite the most distant station I've worked this year. New Zealand and Australia beat it out. But I'm still happy to have worked him and the other Brazilian station from yesterday.

* The reverse beacon showed that my signal was getting out all over the place last night, including Japan and South Africa. I tried calling the South African station on the off chance that he was in his shack and watching the software when I called him instead of whatever South Africans do in the morning, but no such luck. Someday . . . someday.

* Or . . . maybe? After I tried calling him I went back to calling CQ before I went to bed, and after about the third try I saw a very faint signal on the waterfall. I could tell it was there but the software wasn't decoding it. At one point instead of CQ I sent QRZ? ("Who is calling me?") in the hope that he would keep trying and conditions would improve, but they never did before I had to switch over to monitoring and go to sleep. When that happens I occasionally tell myself it's some rare DX trying to get in touch with me, but it's much more likely to be a station in the gray area where their signal has gone up into the ionosphere but not come back down yet. Rare DX from Boise or Medford. :-)

* I am waiting to hear back from a recruiter on a job I interviewed for on Thursday. This would be a good job, but it would mean I'd have to commute to the Eastside again. The things we have to put up with to do mundane stuff like pay the rent.

* Igor the Younger banged into my banjo the other day. He knocked the bridge flat, broke the first string and knocked the tailpiece a bit out of line. I wasn't happy about this, but I'm glad he didn't put a hole through the head. I'd been thinking I can't remember the last time I changed strings, so it was time to do that anyway. Now I'll probably just take all the strings off, clean everything that looks like it can be cleaned, realign the tailpiece and put on new strings. If I do that it probably won't take much to get it into shape for my Interfilk gig at Conchord when that gets ready to roll around.

When I inspected the damage I found a crack in the bridge, so I'll also need to order a new bridge. I use a compensating bridge these days and the local music store doesn't carry them. Dusty Strings might, but I never make it to that part of town anymore. Honestly it's easier to order one over the net.

Norwescon starts tomorrow! And I am performing! And as usual I feel woefully underprepared. For one thing, I don't have a set list yet. I need to sit down and knock one out on my lunch break or something so I know what to practice in the next 54 hours or so.

One thing they do right is post the programming grids well in advance of the con. I downloaded a set and printed them out in actually readable format, and marked up the time slots that I'm expected to be somewhere. Next comes the things I would like to go to if given the chance. I need to make some time for the dealer's room – I don't think I ever made it to the dealer's room or art show at Orycon. Not that I have money to spend, but I do enjoy looking at all the gewgaws and veeblefetzers and thinking "Someday I'll be able to go to a con and won't be too broke to spend money at the dealer's room."

If you're at NWC come join me Friday at 7 as I play the banjo! And sing! And sometimes I sing without playing the banjo! I will have a couple of songs that are new to Norwescon, I promise. And probably one that's new to anywhere, co-written by Igor the Younger. Honestly. I mean, how many times are you going to get to hear a song that was partially written by a four-year-old?

No, the four year old is not me. Who said that??

This is me, about 9:30 at night, sitting in my office chair in front of my computer, playing my banjo and keeping half an ear on the conversation going between a couple of my friends on one of the local repeaters. They're talking about antennas. I might put down the banjo and join in if I have a question or something to add, but I'm mostly content to plunk and listen.

My grandson is trying to convince me to put a videotape into the VCR so he can watch it for about five minutes and go wander off and go do something else.

I have a house to live in, food to eat, interesting toys to play with and a loving family.

Life is good.

That is all.