break time

I finally got a cortisone shot this morning for the tenosynovitis in my right hand/wrist. I still have to take a couple of days off of banjo playing, between that and my left index finger, which I hurt somehow while playing an F chord. So far the key of C (which I only just started on yesterday) = suck. I don't think I have any songs that would work around my painful digits.

Stay tuned for resumed banjo rambling, maybe tomorrow night. For now, it's back in the splint for my picking hand.

slowly going forward

I turned the page! And slides are killing me! And they're an essential component of bluegrass music! So I have to learn them! But pinches are hella easy and they sound pretty too. I'm working on an arrangement of "Cripple Creek" that's got slides and pinches. Knowing the tune and the tune being a particularly beautiful one are my motivators. I'm really glad I got the banjo I did, since the neck is more narrow than the Gold Tone's was. I'm having a hard enough time sliding and keeping my fingers off the other strings at the same time, if there was more neck in the way I would probably still be on the floor crying.

This morning I practiced in my old bedroom with the windows open. Since I was off in the far corner of the house, I decided to leave the mute off so I could have a better idea of how my slide attempts sound. I love practicing with the mute off, and the wildlife seemed to love it too: a bee showed up and buzzed around the screen every time I played. So today, practice was hard, but in a good way. I'm sounding more and more bluegrassy every day, and that makes me quite happy.

Pickin' at the old homestead

I'm in Indiana visiting my folks these days. Banjo practice hasn't been too badly affected by the change of location. Last night I played "Old Joe Clark" ten times, with a smattering of other songs and exercises. This song's at least twice as long as anything else I know how to play. And everyone thought I was in the other room playing computer games because my mute is powerful enough to keep the racket contained by a flimsy little plywood door.

The other cool thing is that after a fair amount of poking around online, I found the tab for the three-finger arrangement of "Journey of the Sorceror," which unfortunately I can't completely read yet. It must have some hammer-on or hammer-off stuff going on, which I haven't gotten to yet. Soon, though.

I think now I've gone through all the basic rolls, so the next step should be slides and then more complicated things. I just have to get up the nerve to flip to the next chapter.

Bonus!

I got to practice for a whole hour today, while The Husband took The Gaz to the zoo. Bliss! Any day I get my hour's work out of the way before bedtime (and therefore without the encumbrance of the mute) is a good, good day.

little update

Banjo is going well, and I celebrated installing the printer on my laptop (which is running Ubuntu now, instead of Windows) by printing out that alternate thumb roll exercise I've been meaning to employ. Just how many ways to play "Roving Gambler" are there, anyway?* At least it makes playing the same song over and over less like playing the same song over and over.


* The answer is "at least one more" as I haven't gotten to backward rolls yet, although that's coming soon. And then there are nigh-infinite combinations of rolls from there on out. . .

I know you're all pining to know how the banjo is going, here's the report. I'm getting better. I did well enough on "Roving Gambler" the other night that I moved on to "Loch Lomond" for a little while, so now I've got three songs that I rotate between when I practice, which makes practice more fun and also makes it easier for me to make it a whole hour in spite of exhaustion and tired and achey hands.

I've also received and put to use my banjo mute. It turns out that there's a bit of a learning curve there. The first thing I did when installing it is knock my bridge over, which is really no good. I'm better now, and hopefully have learned enough that I won't damage the bridge. They're not too expensive to replace, but man, I really don't want to get into that level of banjo maintenance right now. On that subject, my third string is not holding tune as well as the others, and I've realized everything I play relies heavily on that string. Next on the agenda is to try to pick up some other songs that will at least wear my strings out more evenly.

I'm in the induction phase of The Banjo Diet, so I've been listening to as much bluegrass as I can get my hands on (the better to be able to tell when I sound good and when I sound like crap). I am digging Flatt & Scruggs, but I was surprised that nothing that I'm learning comes close to Scruggs's sound, not even a seriously slowed down version. Then I remembered that Scruggs has his own unique method of playing, a method which I was told by the banjo maven at Different Strummer is too complicated for an absolute beginner, so I should really be listening to other things. Gonna roll around in some Osborne Brothers and Ralph Stanley tunes and see if that helps. At least I'll get to know some other banjo players.

It turns out that my tendinitis does affect my playing more than I had optimistically estimated, but it's like crochet in that it kinda balances out other tendon-straining activities. I can still definitely overdo it, but as long as I don't start off the night with an hour of banjo (and now that I've got my mute, I'm not limited to early evening practicing) I can use it to take the edge off the strain of, say, painting or handwriting or coloring with Gaz. In other tendinitis news, I'm planning on a cortisone shot and contemplating acupuncture as a way of fixing things without surgery and trips to the hand surgeon. There's a place in the old 'hood that treats everyone in one big "lounge" instead of individual treatment rooms, so that keeps the costs down. I'm thinking of checking that out.