one hates to be bored
Apr. 13th, 2019 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So. Myriad things going on, as ever.
I have resolved that we need a second banjo, since both of us are keeping up on it. I'm quite enjoying it, even if I still can only play three songs and three chords. The teacher advised that since we have one open-back banjo, we should invest in a banjo with a resonator, which is the more usual bluegrass style, and since the picking style we're learning is typical of bluegrass, it makes sense to get a bluegrass-style banjo to go with it. Resonator banjos tend to be more expensive, but like any musical instrument, vary wildly in price and quality.
So the banjo we already own is a Deering Goodtime banjo, approximately this model, though it was on sale when we bought it apparently.
The teacher said the one we have is fine, better than he'd expected for what it was and what it looked like-- unfinished wood, guitar tuners, minimal inlays, no resonator (the thing behind the back of the banjo that catches the sound and reflects it back out to the front), no tone ring (a tone ring is a ring of heavy metal inside the drum-looking bit of the banjo, which serves to dampen vibrations and improve the sound, crucial for fast-picking bluegrass styles)-- but for a second one, not only should we get a resonator but we should try to get one with a tone ring as well, and look for planetary tuners-- which just means the tuning pegs extend straight back through the top bit, they're more traditional and more expensive than guitar ones-- and we should get capo spikes put in, which are little hooks that stick out the side of the banjo so you can clip your fifth string into position at different tunings, without retuning it, which is great for single-song changes and the like. (You really... don't fret the fifth string, that's not how it works. It just is the note it is. But sometimes you want it to be a different note, so.)
The banjos I'm looking at are the Gold Tone BG150, which is Gold Tone's sort of intro-level bluegrass resonator (pro: lightweight, con: $$ and also no tone ring that I can find described?), the Gold Tone CCR100, which is the upgrade of Gold Tone's entry-level banjo full stop (pros: cheapish! has tone ring! cons: uhh cheapish, no capo spikes) or the slightly nicer upgraded "plus" version, the CC-R-100+ (pros: capo spikes thank you! cons: uh expensiveish but it's still an entry model), the RK-20 Songster (pros: cheap! cons: uh sort of, well, cheap, see below), or one I encountered at a music store, a Gretsch Broadkaster "Deluxe"-- pros: it's local! i touched it! i like it! sounds beautiful! on big sale for uh $599! cons: low action was real confusing and I kept playing the wrong note by accident.
We went to two local music stores, one of which I had forgotten existed but it was next to the ice cream shop we went to by accident. I walked in and they had two banjos, one cheap open-backed one that was unsuitable, and one beautiful-looking resonator, which was the Gretsch mentioned above. It was really lovely, and sounded lovely, and looked lovely, but I was hard-pressed to figure out how to play it.
We went on to the other music store, and they had more banjos, but they were all bad! One was the Deering we already have, but used, but barely used, but not quite as nice as ours. Another was left-handed, which was bizarre to encounter. And the other two were used. And one of those was... I really think it was an older version of the RK Songster, above-- a few superficial details look the same as the photo, and I just-- I think it's the same or nearly so, and I didn't like it. Brassing on the chrome, cheap guitar tuners, it was grungy, and they still wanted three hundred dollars for it. No.
I wanted to go back to the first store and just buy the Gretsch, but I was foiled by it being after 5pm and the store being closed. And I don't do impulse-buys like that, it doesn't generally work out well for me.
So I sort of wish I'd just bought the one at the music shop, but by the time I reached that conclusion, they were closed, and won't open again until Monday.
It was sunny and warm-ish today, so I did laundry and hung it on the line, which I much prefer-- I don't like using the clothes dryer, it prematurely wears stuff out and fades it, but hanging stuff on hangers all over the house is not conducive to having a tidy house, and it's a lot of work and you have to shift them if they wind up, like, on the shower curtain rod or something, and so on. So that was nice. Dude even helped by hanging up a load that finished too late for me to get to it before my class; he never hangs clothes out, so I was quite pleased.
I had a class today-- papermaking, at the Book Arts Center where I crippled myself a couple of years back falling off a flight of stairs (that's how my roller derby career ended, wow that was a while ago now! I should look it up but I'm not gonna, rest assured it was a wild time and if I ponder it more deeply I can say it's got to have been six years ago and i haven't gone down a flight of stairs without thinking twice since that day).
It was a lovely class, with an entertaining teacher and a lot of information and I'm going to have to look into all this in more detail but having seen it now with my eyes, I get it, and my plans for eventualworld domination things I could do with dried flowers that aren't potpourri, wreaths, or yet more dried arrangements could come to fruition along with using the flax byproducts that don't turn out good for fabric, so. Cool.
The only downside of the class is that of course there was one man in it, and the man of course had to talk all the time, and while the rest of us were generally cognizant that people had to wait their turn to use the equipment so we should go into each turn we took with some kind of advance plan of what we wanted to do, and our materials ready so that while of course we shouldn't rush, we wouldn't hold up the whole process as we stood around making decisions, but he never seemed to notice at all, and would just stand there with the frame in his hands talking about how he felt about various colors and how his artistic process worked and of course how he was himself an art teacher and had for many years *insert redundant anecdote he'd already told even though we'd only been here an hour* etcetera.
The youngest other student present, a college sophomore, inadvertently threw herself on the grenade of mostly being the one to talk to him by... answering his question about what she was studying. I accidentally started the conversation; she was designing a sheet of paper and admitted it was in her school colors and I said oh what school, and then he was off. So you figure she was like... 20 or 21? He was hugely gray-bearded, I'd estimate 55 at least, and I'm 39, and every other woman was at least 50. So of course he had to find out what her major was and then tell her everything he knew on the topic. Sigh. I kept trying to get back into the conversation with her just to kind of... ease him off a little... but he seemed to honestly not be able to hear me when I spoke, so that was weird.
I guess it's good to know I'm close enough to old to be invisible in that situation.
He also condescended to the instructor about her probably not being old enough to know what her favorite colors were. Her hair was dyed those colors and she was probably close to my age, but she'd mentioned she had two children, one a toddler, and he was like "well you have young kids and that means you're young, your tastes will change as you age because mine did." Like, what the actual.... she is a woman in her thirties or so with a full-time art career and did I mention her hair was dyed those colors? I think she knows her mind.
Whatever, dude!
Anyhow after the class, I dragged Dude out to the ice cream shop with me since I'd missed lunch, and then we went into two different musical instrument shops I mentioned above, and then we went to the cider hall and got a growler to drink this week, which is my blow against disposable containers. Then Dude made dinner, and I realized that I have at least one more Goblin Emperor fic scene to write, and I glanced back at my outline for this story and it's entirely hilariously wrong. HAR. I can't outline for shit, y'all.
(The fic's original premise was Beshelar discovering the hard (HAR) way that he was unbearably attracted to the Emperor by overhearing the royal couple fucking but what actually has happened in this fic is that poor Telimezh is white-knuckling his way through bodyguarding the wedding night and realizing that he's unbearably infatuated with Her Royal Sword Nerd Highness. Meanwhile, Beshelar, totally unfazed by his professional obligation to voyeurism, is instead having a gay crisis over Csevet. This is not in the slightest what I meant, but like, we all have problems as writers, okay.)
I have resolved that we need a second banjo, since both of us are keeping up on it. I'm quite enjoying it, even if I still can only play three songs and three chords. The teacher advised that since we have one open-back banjo, we should invest in a banjo with a resonator, which is the more usual bluegrass style, and since the picking style we're learning is typical of bluegrass, it makes sense to get a bluegrass-style banjo to go with it. Resonator banjos tend to be more expensive, but like any musical instrument, vary wildly in price and quality.
So the banjo we already own is a Deering Goodtime banjo, approximately this model, though it was on sale when we bought it apparently.
The teacher said the one we have is fine, better than he'd expected for what it was and what it looked like-- unfinished wood, guitar tuners, minimal inlays, no resonator (the thing behind the back of the banjo that catches the sound and reflects it back out to the front), no tone ring (a tone ring is a ring of heavy metal inside the drum-looking bit of the banjo, which serves to dampen vibrations and improve the sound, crucial for fast-picking bluegrass styles)-- but for a second one, not only should we get a resonator but we should try to get one with a tone ring as well, and look for planetary tuners-- which just means the tuning pegs extend straight back through the top bit, they're more traditional and more expensive than guitar ones-- and we should get capo spikes put in, which are little hooks that stick out the side of the banjo so you can clip your fifth string into position at different tunings, without retuning it, which is great for single-song changes and the like. (You really... don't fret the fifth string, that's not how it works. It just is the note it is. But sometimes you want it to be a different note, so.)
The banjos I'm looking at are the Gold Tone BG150, which is Gold Tone's sort of intro-level bluegrass resonator (pro: lightweight, con: $$ and also no tone ring that I can find described?), the Gold Tone CCR100, which is the upgrade of Gold Tone's entry-level banjo full stop (pros: cheapish! has tone ring! cons: uhh cheapish, no capo spikes) or the slightly nicer upgraded "plus" version, the CC-R-100+ (pros: capo spikes thank you! cons: uh expensiveish but it's still an entry model), the RK-20 Songster (pros: cheap! cons: uh sort of, well, cheap, see below), or one I encountered at a music store, a Gretsch Broadkaster "Deluxe"-- pros: it's local! i touched it! i like it! sounds beautiful! on big sale for uh $599! cons: low action was real confusing and I kept playing the wrong note by accident.
We went to two local music stores, one of which I had forgotten existed but it was next to the ice cream shop we went to by accident. I walked in and they had two banjos, one cheap open-backed one that was unsuitable, and one beautiful-looking resonator, which was the Gretsch mentioned above. It was really lovely, and sounded lovely, and looked lovely, but I was hard-pressed to figure out how to play it.
We went on to the other music store, and they had more banjos, but they were all bad! One was the Deering we already have, but used, but barely used, but not quite as nice as ours. Another was left-handed, which was bizarre to encounter. And the other two were used. And one of those was... I really think it was an older version of the RK Songster, above-- a few superficial details look the same as the photo, and I just-- I think it's the same or nearly so, and I didn't like it. Brassing on the chrome, cheap guitar tuners, it was grungy, and they still wanted three hundred dollars for it. No.
I wanted to go back to the first store and just buy the Gretsch, but I was foiled by it being after 5pm and the store being closed. And I don't do impulse-buys like that, it doesn't generally work out well for me.
So I sort of wish I'd just bought the one at the music shop, but by the time I reached that conclusion, they were closed, and won't open again until Monday.
It was sunny and warm-ish today, so I did laundry and hung it on the line, which I much prefer-- I don't like using the clothes dryer, it prematurely wears stuff out and fades it, but hanging stuff on hangers all over the house is not conducive to having a tidy house, and it's a lot of work and you have to shift them if they wind up, like, on the shower curtain rod or something, and so on. So that was nice. Dude even helped by hanging up a load that finished too late for me to get to it before my class; he never hangs clothes out, so I was quite pleased.
I had a class today-- papermaking, at the Book Arts Center where I crippled myself a couple of years back falling off a flight of stairs (that's how my roller derby career ended, wow that was a while ago now! I should look it up but I'm not gonna, rest assured it was a wild time and if I ponder it more deeply I can say it's got to have been six years ago and i haven't gone down a flight of stairs without thinking twice since that day).
It was a lovely class, with an entertaining teacher and a lot of information and I'm going to have to look into all this in more detail but having seen it now with my eyes, I get it, and my plans for eventual
The only downside of the class is that of course there was one man in it, and the man of course had to talk all the time, and while the rest of us were generally cognizant that people had to wait their turn to use the equipment so we should go into each turn we took with some kind of advance plan of what we wanted to do, and our materials ready so that while of course we shouldn't rush, we wouldn't hold up the whole process as we stood around making decisions, but he never seemed to notice at all, and would just stand there with the frame in his hands talking about how he felt about various colors and how his artistic process worked and of course how he was himself an art teacher and had for many years *insert redundant anecdote he'd already told even though we'd only been here an hour* etcetera.
The youngest other student present, a college sophomore, inadvertently threw herself on the grenade of mostly being the one to talk to him by... answering his question about what she was studying. I accidentally started the conversation; she was designing a sheet of paper and admitted it was in her school colors and I said oh what school, and then he was off. So you figure she was like... 20 or 21? He was hugely gray-bearded, I'd estimate 55 at least, and I'm 39, and every other woman was at least 50. So of course he had to find out what her major was and then tell her everything he knew on the topic. Sigh. I kept trying to get back into the conversation with her just to kind of... ease him off a little... but he seemed to honestly not be able to hear me when I spoke, so that was weird.
I guess it's good to know I'm close enough to old to be invisible in that situation.
He also condescended to the instructor about her probably not being old enough to know what her favorite colors were. Her hair was dyed those colors and she was probably close to my age, but she'd mentioned she had two children, one a toddler, and he was like "well you have young kids and that means you're young, your tastes will change as you age because mine did." Like, what the actual.... she is a woman in her thirties or so with a full-time art career and did I mention her hair was dyed those colors? I think she knows her mind.
Whatever, dude!
Anyhow after the class, I dragged Dude out to the ice cream shop with me since I'd missed lunch, and then we went into two different musical instrument shops I mentioned above, and then we went to the cider hall and got a growler to drink this week, which is my blow against disposable containers. Then Dude made dinner, and I realized that I have at least one more Goblin Emperor fic scene to write, and I glanced back at my outline for this story and it's entirely hilariously wrong. HAR. I can't outline for shit, y'all.
(The fic's original premise was Beshelar discovering the hard (HAR) way that he was unbearably attracted to the Emperor by overhearing the royal couple fucking but what actually has happened in this fic is that poor Telimezh is white-knuckling his way through bodyguarding the wedding night and realizing that he's unbearably infatuated with Her Royal Sword Nerd Highness. Meanwhile, Beshelar, totally unfazed by his professional obligation to voyeurism, is instead having a gay crisis over Csevet. This is not in the slightest what I meant, but like, we all have problems as writers, okay.)
