*series of rhythmic grunts*

[dragonlady7]

Now I'm remembering my old dilemma with LJ, which is that I always felt like I had to title my post, and I always would try to put the title on first, and then I'd write the post and it would have nothing to do with the title. It was a hilarious unending struggle, and I made a lot of little memes in my own mind.
Really. I'm shit at titles. I mean, I do okay, but it's always way more effort than it should be. Which I suppose is the case for most people. So I won't bitch about it anymore, but I'm just lampshading it-- the titles on the entries on this journal are fucking bonkers nonsense at best and I might as well lean into it.

So here's a personal thing.
I've been uncovering, over the last few months, that if I don't have regular exercise, one of my hips (uh I think the left one?) just ceases to function. Standing in one place for hours is The Worst Thing, but sitting for too long is also a Bad Idea. And coincidentally, I started being able to walk to work, which is an easy, flat, 1.4-mile trek over concrete sidewalks with nice crosswalks at all major intersections. It's fucking ideal, really. And for a couple of months now, it's been just the ticket. Over weekends I'm a lazy lump, and my hip bothers me, sometimes my lower back gets cranky, and then it's Monday and I make myself slog to work and it's all cured, with some limping and judicious stretching and such.

But New Year's Eve-eve I had some bad cramps, and instead of the usual just-uterus kind of deal, they seized up my lower back. And my lower back has been hella fuckin' cranky ever since? And I've made myself walk to work anyway, figuring the only way out is through, but I have been really suffering. It's the muscles down where you've got, like, three layers of muscle, where your back and your pelvis and your legs all kind of attach together? I've torn one of those before, thanks roller derby, and then my coach told me the only way out is through, and in retrospect I should have told her to fuck off but instead I wound up in the ER after passing out at 5am so like. Don't do that, guys; sometimes the only way out is to sit the fuck down for a second, okay? Also I was like 29 and really easily led. I mean, I thought I wasn't, but I was, so. I probably still am. Holy shit that was 10 years ago. WHATEVER.

So, long story short, it's still annoying as fuck, but another thing I learned in roller derby is that sometimes the way to fix a cranky back is to work on your abs for a while. And it does help a lot-- if you have bad muscle shit going on behind, do a bunch of crunches and stuff. Just, for the love of pete, take it easy. It's real hard to know the good, like, working hard kind of pain from the BAD NEWS CUT THAT SHIT OUT pain. I assumed I knew the difference and really, no, I don't. I mean, there are unmistakable cases, but. No, man, that shit can be subtle, even though it doesn't sound like it.

Anyway, I walked to work today, and took really long strides so that I'd be engaging my core more and such (it's blessedly ice-free, currently, and I did reflect for a moment that I have all this cold weather gear stored up for When It's Really Winter and honestly, it's fucking January, we're well into it now, and it turns out this is actually kind of a mild winter so far so here's hoping I didn't jinx it because honestly I don't want to wear the Hideous Orange Jumpsuit to walk in?), and then I sort of self-consciously rolled around on the floor doing crunches and things. Nobody comes up here first thing in the morning so maybe I'm good, but I need to vacuum this goddamn rug if I'm going to do that much more.

We'll see; my back is already displeased with sitting in this chair and I've only been sitting here a bit over an hour. :(


Oh so I think I mentioned? Every once in a while Dude comes up with a weird idea out of left field. Last year, this time, it was, "Let's go to Kyrgyzstan," so we did that. This year, in the autumn, he was like, "I gotta pick up a weird hobby," and I was like "go for it baby I suggest carpentry" which didn't go over well. (Hey. We need some carpentry done. At least I didn't say plumbing.) His initial idea was that he was going to pick up something really esoteric that involved renting complicated equipment, getting briefly obsessed with it, starting a complicated project, and then abandoning it and returning the rented equipment, which displays a pretty high degree of self-awareness from him, I think.

But instead he settled on "I know! Banjo lessons!" which was pretty out there. And then of course he went and bought a banjo, instead of renting one.
It's sort of funny because I'm intermittently super into folk music, and used to drag him to the local music joint's weekly Irish seisuns, where I would sing some of the literally hours-long repertoire of songs I have memorized, and he'd get super bored and fall asleep at the bar. So we stopped doing that because he was so really incredibly not into it. But I guess he's not that not into it.

Anyway, the banjo arrived last night, and if you look at my Instagram stories I have his first attempts at playing chords on it. So that was nice.

So I dragged out my harp, and tuned it, and then retrieved my guitar from the attic, and tuned that too. Obviously we have no shortage of optimistically-purchased musical instruments in this house. But he's actually got lessons booked with a guy, so maybe he'll learn how to do something.
And the dirty little secret of banjo is that it's tuned in a chord, so if you just strum it, it sounds good, unlike a guitar, which if you just strum it open sounds like absolute I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing hell.

*shrug* We'll see what happens. He signed me up for lessons too; if he abandons it, then maybe I'll play it. Maybe not. The farm BIL is actually an accomplished guitar player, though, so maybe he'll want to jam. I have no idea. But it could be fun.

I can pick out all kinds of stuff on the harp I have, but I don't know how to do the fingerings properly so I can't go fast.

But I was really pleased to remember enough music theory to understand that if I flip the tuning levers on my F strings to sharp them, then I can play any song in G, which is what the banjo's tuned to. So that was fun.

Comments

[buttonsbeadslace]

I've been trying to title my posts more too, since the inbox page is way more informative when your posts have titles.

A long time ago, I used to be a semi-regular commenter on a website where, if you didn't title your comment, the first few words of the body would automatically become the title. And I liked that, it appeals to the part of my brain that gets uncomfortable with repitition. So sometimes I just do that, make the title the start of a sentence and finish it in the body of the post.

(And then every so often I go, "Wait, Lace, this is a thing you learned from That One Author's Website, it's not a common thing, most people don't do it, are you confusing people by doing this?" But nobody has complained about it, at least.)

[dragonlady7]

oh but the tumblr crossposter does that too.

also that's how a lot of hymnals work anyway, isn't it? (hilarious, to me, once to find William Blake's Jerusalem filed under And Did These Feet)

[buttonsbeadslace]

That's true, the crossposter sort of does that, but it includes the person's username, sometimes several people's usernames, and idk, it just doesn't feel the same. But it is probably irrational of me to think it would confuse anyone.

OMG yes first-line indexes are the most hilarious thing.

Anyway, re: the main point of your post, you have a harp? That's so cool! I definitely approve of the whole collecting-musical-instruments thing, even if you don't play them that often. I had a lot of fun with my mother's set of recorders when I was a kid.

[dragonlady7]

IDK, I think the first line as title is an aesthetic in enough places that it's not weird.

I do have a harp! I had some friends who were constantly starting businesses, and one of the businesses was that they managed to get themselves registered as distributors for some company that makes cheap-ish ethnic instruments, so I managed to get a smallish """Irish""""" harp at dealer cost. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't expensive. It's got like... ehn like 4 octaves or so, and it does have tuning levers that don't work great but do mostly get the job done so that you can, say, play in G by sharping all the Fs, which I've done so I can play along with the banjo, kind of.

I grew up with a piano in the house, and I just think that's such a huge leg up on being musical at all, because so much of reading music and studying music theory just, like, assumes a piano keyboard, and I just grew up knowing how piano keyboards interrelated, like before I could read I could play a scale for fun. I got lessons when I was like 5, and I've forgotten everything and couldn't play a piano to save myself, but I can still pick out a melody on a keyboard because that's easy.
And so the same thing goes for a harp, only it's strings instead of keys, and you don't really have accidentals.

Mine is nice because all the Cs are red and the Fs are blue so you can find the octaves easily enough.

But you have to tune every string every time you sit down to play, because it's cheap, so most of the time I spend on music is just spent tuning the harp.

Also I have literally no idea how one is meant to produce sound with a harp, beyond like a general sense of how strings work, so. I should take the literal baby step of looking on YouTube but even that's beyond me in the last, oh, like, seven years I've had this thing...

[buttonsbeadslace]

That's so interesting, because I also grew up with a piano in the house, and picked out tunes before I was really Taught anything about music, but the way I understand sheet music and music theory is not piano-related at all. I have absorbed basic piano awareness, I know which letter names go with which key on the keyboard, but I don't think in piano. I guess that's because the first time I really needed to read music, the first time I had to play something I had never heard before from just paper, was when I started taking cello lessons. I still do cello fingerings in the air if I'm having trouble understanding sheet music.

[dragonlady7]

I have always loved cello!!
I took, like, one semester of music theory, and I sucked at it-- took a test where I got literally every answer wrong-- but the professor approached me and asked me to stick with it because the thing was, while I'd gotten every question wrong, they had all been perfectly correct in relationship to one another, which meant that I understood the underlying theory perfectly. (In which case, you might ask, why no partial credit? Why would I get such a terrible score for simply having started in the wrong place but then performed the entire rest of the test perfectly? Why?) I told him I couldn't afford the hit to my GPA it would take in order for me to figure out my own special ed accommodations, since clearly I couldn't understand it from the instruction provided, and declined to continue with that course of study. I've also been rejected from basically every audition I've ever tried, so it's been quite a while since academic music and I have been on any kind of speaking terms.
But that's no reason to never play anything anymore and only sing in the car, so. *shrug*

I just feel like most of the explanations you see of various musical theories are displayed on a drawing of a piano keyboard, because it's easy to see the distances between the notes and such. and a piano keyboard directly lays onto a harp, it's really just a mechanism to more efficiently play a harp, so it stands to reason that it's easy also to see notes laid out like that side-by-side, instead of having to finger them onto longer strings and such.

But I never have mastered any instrument you have to fret, and most of my musical performance experience was on clarinet and bass clarinet, which only play one note at once and so are largely the same as vocal production in terms of what kind of music theory you need to know. I honestly have trouble wrapping my mind around playing more than one note at once.

And banjo is fascinating because it is tuned to a chord and you play one note at a time. You never strum a banjo, you "roll" it, which is plucking various of the strings in sequence with two fingers and a thumb-- and there are different styles of doing that, but all of them agree, you don't strum a banjo at all. The instruction book even informs you that you don't have to learn any notes besides quarter and eighth, because since a banjo has zero sustain you'll never be playing anything longer.
But that means that your melody is constantly being surrounded by other notes, like you play a chord around every note you play, but you play the chord in eighth notes as the melody moves. Every note is a little cluster of notes, and there's just this constant sonic assault coming from your instrument, and that's that. There's no dynamics and there's no sustain, just a bunch of notes played at the same volume at the same tempo at all times.

[buttonsbeadslace]

Re: music theory being taught with piano diagrams, you actually have one up on me, because I've never taken a music theory class at all. My high school didn't offer it, and in college it was tied into the music major track by a bunch of other requirements. I never had room in my schedule to take Music Theory 1 *and* Ear Training 1 (or whatever the class nmes were) at the same time, so I never did. All I know about music theory is incidental stuff that was mentioned in my cello lessons or in choir/orchestra rehearsal. The whole system of how you name chords, in particular, is a mystery to me.

Re: rolling a chord, cello is actually kind of similar! They write chords with 2/3/4 notes in cello music, but when you're playing with a bow you can only play two strings at once, so to play a larger chord you sort of roll across, or play two notes together and then two other notes. (I once played a piece where I actually had to move my hand position between the first and second half of what was technically one chord, because I couldn't reach all the notes at once.) So I'm with you, that makes more sense to me than big chords do.