dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with banjo

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so I finally, finally ordered a capo for my banjo.

i don’t understand capos. Like… I get it… sort of? in theory? you just put that on and then you play your instrument just like the neck ends at the capo, and you just move everything up and then it’s all the same thing only higher. right? i get it. sort of. i guess?

i didn’t get it, though.

and then i got one and i put it on [and then i retuned my drone string because the capo doesn’t cover the drone string] and i was like, this is dumb i don’t get it, and then i tried to play a song i know and completely failed because listen i use the markings on the fretboard to navigate, and the markings don’t move when you put the capo on?

but then i counted it out and tried again and

oh my gosh i now am playing the same song, only a couple of notes higher?

i didn’t get it before because there was nothing to get but now i get it

there’s nothing to get, that’s all

maybe i still don’t get it but at least i think i get that there’s nothing to get.

I remember now what else I was going to talk about in this morning's entry.
My banjo teacher.

So, he's a lovely, weird due, with a deeply weird, lovely family. He's from Ohio, his wife is aggressively friendly and strange and from Wyoming, his kids are like 12 and 16 and rambunctious and deeply bizarre, in the normal manner of teenagers, and they all just seem like lovely and extremely eccentric people.

His dayjob is working with developmentally-disabled folks, largely kids, in some sort of educational capacity, I didn't really catch the whole thing. So he knows a lot about styles of learning, and I'd thought he was a musical educator but no, that's his side gig. He told us a great story about teaching some kids music theory with the steps to their basement, since there were twelve of them. Anyway, he's great.
From the beginning, we've noticed that he has a bad tremor that seems to affect both hands, but the right one moreso. He's got a worn spot on the heads of all his banjos, because in Scruggs ("Three Finger") style you play with your littlest, or last two, fingers planted on the head and move only the other three, and in his case, the planted finger often shakes and drags along the banjo head. It doesn't make much noise, and doesn't matter, but it is noticeable; he very occasionally strikes a string he didn't mean to, usually while he's demonstrating something, though given the wall-of-sound nature of the bluegrass banjo, as long as he's fretted properly it doesn't really matter.
He's mentioned it, a time or two-- explaining that it's hard to type, etc., and he's drawn us diagrams and it's always such a hassle I tend to try to come prepared so he doesn't have to-- and he's got it set up so a lot of stuff, he can just print whatever it is out on the printer. But he's never explained much about it, and we never asked because why would you ask about that? He just said at one point that he was glad he wasn't a surgeon or something, and that it hasn't gotten in the way of his banjo or dobro playing yet.

But last night at the session he explained, to me but partly to the other two guys there too, with whom I think he was vaguely acquainted, that the tremor is progressively getting worse and he expects he doesn't have a very long time left in which he'll be able to play, so he's trying to play as much as he can now, and is recording stuff because that'll be what he's got left when he can't do it anymore.
This might explain somewhat why he was so unconcerned about how much our lessons cost-- he charges me and Dude the same whether one or both of us comes, with the reasoning that it's the same amount of time/work for two as for one. But it's grim to contemplate. He's not that old a guy, maybe in his early 50s at the latest.

He said toward the end of the session that they're not sure what's causing the tremor but it seems likely that it's Parkinson's.
I'm just so sorry to hear it. I hope by "not long" he means like, ten years, because we've been taking lessons a year already and we need a lot more work.

Well, I didn't bring my computer to work, and my compromise with Tumblr is that I only look at it from one device, which is my laptop. (It and Facebook are not and never shall be on my work computer or my phone. Google can track me everywhere but at least Facebook has to be content with the vast majority of my data instead of all of it.)
(Amazon likewise is only in one browser on one device, and so the shadow profile it collects on me at work where I'm logged in as a seller is probably pretty hilariously weird. I don't ever even click affiliate links on my work computer because what "you've" been browsing lately shows up to everyone in the company and no thanks, I don't need the weird brothers who own our company in Philadelphia knowing the shit I get up to online even if they wouldn't ever be able to tell which of us it was. Though I do occasionally deliberately search for really weird shit on eBay and Etsy while logged in just for shits and giggles, because I know my coworker locally is the only one who'd notice.)
(Yes, the work Etsy's "recently searched for" is mostly rubber fetish gear at any given time, but what's funny is that I don't think my coworker realizes he's logged in and so sometimes there's even weirder shit in the recents. Never kinky, alas, just weird, but I know it's stuff he's looked at.)

Anyhow I was going to post about last night. Dude was feeling grouchy and unpleasant, and so instead of going to the Monthly Bluegrass Jam Night our teacher hosts at the library by his house, he stayed home. I dithered, but then went on my own, and it was lovely.
( talking about music a little )

The other thing I did that I'd been procrastinating since ohh, recently, November? was that I finally dropped my car off to get new tires put on. In March when I got my last inspection they were like uhhhh ma'am these tires, well. they pass, but. and I was like what kind of idiot replaces their all-seasons in spring? i'm waiting until fall. so i meant to do that in fall. But it's winter, it's well into winter, and Dude was driving my car one snowy day and was like holy shit these tires suck and if I'm driving out to the farm next week I am just asking for there to be a lake effect storm by Syracuse that I die in because I'm driving on a glossy low-friction finish instead of all-weather tires. So.
I started shopping online for tires and then was like, ok, these are all like $500 and then i gotta pay a dude to put them on, so like. no. i'm just going to bring them to my corner garage, which has been good to me in the past, and tell them to put on whatever they think is best. and sure enough, the guy called and was like well I have these good ones you could pick, gave me the sales pitch, gave me the price, and I said yeah that sounds good. He was faintly surprised; I think he'd likely done the classic salesy thing where you start off mid-high and then give them a mid-low and then sell them up to the mid, and I just was like you know, I don't care that much, the mid-high is probably what I actually want.
I've been going to this garage for seventeen years now, and while they're not saints, they're also not charlatans usually, so I'll take it. I can walk there, and once when my car wouldn't start they wheeled their jumpstart machine up the street to my driveway and did the work there, so. Can't beat that.
(Also when Dude's mom dropped off her car there and then tripped on the sidewalk by her house when she'd almost gotten home (you can see the garage from her front window), and hurt herself badly, they came and got her and were extremely solicitous of her, so I like them for that too.)

(Also also one day I dropped my car off on a day when school was out, one of those holidays only schools and banks get, and the new owner's elementary-school-age boys were running riot in the place and clearly all of the mechanics thought it was hilarious and were used to them and were messing around with them affectionately and I also thought that was sweet.)

OK time to work, whatever else I was going to talk about on here isn't coming back to me so I'm just gonna hit "post".

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So, I have this banjo. It is a beautiful Gretsch bluegrass resonator banjo, with lots of mother-of-pearl, and a very heavy, bell-brass tone ring around the inside of the head. It weighs at least fifteen pounds. It is substantial.

I bought a strap for it rather hastily, since it didn’t come with one. I bought a decent brand, Op-Tech, because I was familiar with them– we were a dealer of their camera straps for years, at my dayjob, so I knew what kind of materials and padding I could expect, and I was not disappointed. It was a good, very plain, heavy-duty strap.

I sort of didn’t like it, though. Firstly because it wasn’t adjustable *quite* short enough. Secondly because the way it attached meant it frequently twisted, and the padding made it very uncomfortable when twisted. But due to the banjo being both very heavy, and very smooth, it was nearly impossible to get it settled.

But I figured I’d just live with it; a cheap strap is $30, and the nice leather cradle straps were like… $50 minimum, I wasn’t going to do it.

Well… Dude bought himself one of the nice leather cradle straps, which is fine, it’s his prerogative, he has a lot more money than I do. (We share all our money but I’m always aware that he earns more than four times as much as I do, so I try not to frivolously spend more than I can easily justify as being mine.)

He does *not* have a resonator banjo. He has a hollow-back banjo. This brand of cradle strap– the nicest, if plainest– doesn’t fit Deering hollow-back banjos; there’s not enough clearance in the pins that secure the head in place to allow the strap to pass through.

So I just scored myself a beautiful buffalo-leather cradle strap which I never would have bought myself, and discovered that yes, indeed, it fits beautifully, does a far better job of holding my banjo, and is more comfortable all around than the padded nylon one.

And as an additional bonus, Dude has been laser-focusing on learning The Mermaid so that he can do all the complicated fingerpicking and I can just do chop backup chords so I can focus on singing, which is fucking perfect, because I love to sing that song and am worried about being able to be coordinated enough to sing while playing.

(Not that we’re performing it per se, but I want to play it for my BFF and her kids and it’d be better if we could make it all the way through!)

I’ve also just realized there’s one more week until we’re seeing them than I thought, so maybe there’s enough time to master this one and pick up a second. That would be so fun!

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Last night our teacher taught us Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the banjo.

He started playing it, and then was explaining what he was doing as he went, and then explained “I’m teaching it to myself as I go, I’ve never played this on banjo before,” and then proceeded to break it down into a pretty formulaic chord progression and then explain that, since a banjo has no sustain, what you have to do is find 1) the chords, then 2) the melody notes within the chords, and then 3) a method of ornamentation that brings out the melody notes but keeps the banjo playing because you can’t hold a note so if there’s a sustained note in the melody you need to create an ornamentation pattern that accentuates it. So, slides, reduplication (where you fret two strings to be the same note and then play them both within a roll), hammer-ons, etc, all within the framework of the three-finger rolling patterns that make up most of bluegrass-style banjo playing.

It was great, and it’s what I want to learn to do on the banjo, and next month it’ll be one year of banjo lessons and I’m delighted to have gotten to that point.

He then admitted it was unlikely we’d actually master the song in time for the holiday, but reminded us that we’d absolutely have the chords by then, and you can perform a song at any point in the learning process, whether you have all the ornamentation down pat or not.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convince Dave to bring the banjos with us for Christmas. We’re only going to be gone two days, after all. Not a ton of time for messing around.

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fabledshadow replied to your post “a cute banjo teacher moment”

Next up, Foggy Mountain Breakdown! This is awesome :)

Oh if you think we haven’t been given worksheets to practice the various breaks of Foggy Mountain Breakdown already… I can do the first three seconds of the song and I’ve learned two of the internal riffs of the song but we’re like a year out from any attempt to put the whole thing together. That’s not a song so much as it is a sampler.

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So I’ve been taking banjo lessons since… like… February? I don’t remember now, I’d have to look it up.

The teacher is a guy who for his dayjob, works with disabled kids. He said the official title and I didn’t understand it, so I’ve kind of just filed it away– point is, he’s an educator. I had assumed he worked in music education but no, he does some music therapy work but I think it’s all sideline gigs and his main job is not music-related. He does banjo lessons one or two nights a week for about… there’s four of us on Thursdays, and then some little kids, two or three… anyway, he teaches guitar too but currently doesn’t have any guitar students. He’s a very sweet kind of guy, gently eccentric, with a gently eccentric wife I’m quite fond of as well (she is constantly in the midst of something really bizarre when we come over, something different every time, too).

For these last few months he’s mostly been teaching us basic stuff, and then getting us to remember it by teaching us various songs. (Confusingly, Dude and I both have extensive band experience at woodwinds, so our idea of learning a song is being given sheet music with a single part we have to follow, and our teacher’s experience is largely playing in jams and so he’s decided we don’t do sheet music anymore, and both of us have been Utterly At Sea ever since, but treading water gamely.) So we have a stable of like, six or seven songs, by now, that we know both lead and backup parts for. Anyway, we recently finally made it to our first of the monthly jam sessions he runs, which are attended by his students but also by other interested players, and we discovered that we don’t actually know enough to play along with most of a jam; we only really know three chords, and bluegrass has a stable of chords because it’s often played on an assortment of instruments. Banjos love to be in G so that’s the one we know, but most fiddle tunes are in D or A and mostly the banjos are expected to transpose.) So that was illuminating. Last week he taught some basic music theory stuff to Dude, and then this week he re-taught it to him and to me too.

Banjo’s super easy, it turns out, if you know three basic shapes to hold your hands in to make a chord, and then you can do little sets of chords per song with those three shapes, and in basically any starting position, you can make chords that have the same relationship to one another by following the same progression of shapes. (I think that was his point, but it turns out you have to know the exceptions by memorization, and well, it’s not that simple, but it’s almost that simple and it’s a good starting point to learn to be comfortable with it, anyway.)

So he was trying to think of examples to show us how songs go. Because the ones we already know mostly all go 1, 4, 5, 1 (the numerals being the root of the chord, on the first note of the octave and so on, easier to hear than explain, though I’m not sure I got that progression right, I just know what shape it is). So he was playing us examples, and couldn’t think of one that modulated to a minor even though it’s incredibly common, and suddenly his eyes lit up and he said, “the one about the secret chord!” and I was like “the first, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift?” and he was like bingo, and then showed us how to play about half of Hallelujah on the banjo, and Dude does not know the song somehow and was baffled. But, it turns out, you know, Leonard Cohen was pretty knowledgeable about music theory and in fact did write a pretty good exemplar of a good chord progression for banjo-teaching theory.

So I’m probably going to teach myself the rest of that song and I promise not to Pentatonix it.

Also it is several years until I’ll be able to master the picking part of Blackberry Blossom but I know the chords to it too, because it has almost all of them, it turns out. LOL.

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I am aware that my participation in my sister’s save-the-world locavore food movement whatever is pretty paradoxically carbon-intensive since I have to drive across NYS to participate in it, so every year I sit and reckon whether I can take the train for any of it, and every year I think I manage to do it one time. Mostly, when Dude is going to join me but at a different time, so earlier this season he took the train at least once as well. I love taking the train, because the drive is an extremely boring 300 miles, and the train traverses almost exactly the same terrain but on the other side of the Mohawk River for part of it which gives you some fantastic views you don’t get from the Thruway. (To be fair, there are a few spots on the Thruway where you do get fantastic views, but while driving, well, it’s not like you can admire them all that much. You can probably more than you should, because the driving conditions are so boring, but.) The train station this end is only a half an hour from my house (and in the right direction, too, so you feel like you’re on your way!), and the train station the other end is also only about half an hour from the farm, though it’s in a really weird spot. Still– I ought to be able to take it way more than I do, and somehow I rarely can, but I love it when I can.

So anyway, I’m getting on the 283 (”Empire Line”) tomorrow morning. The thing to keep in mind is that the short lines like that are reasonable– sometimes they get delayed, but sometimes not, and mostly you’re going to make really good time and then randomly sit on a siding in Amsterdam or something, but it’s not like sitting in traffic, you can read your book or whatever. It’s the long-haul lines with the beautiful old names and stately traditions that always get hung up somewhere and then once you’re off-schedule you lose all precedence and have to sit around. So while the Lakeshore Limited has lovely accommodations, it’s going to be delayed in increments best measured by hours. The staff calls it the “Late-For-Sure” and often miss their own train back, which is usually 8 hours later. However, if you need to get from New York City to Chicago, it’s something like 18 hours on the train if it’s running on time, so you’ve already invested effort and you might as well do it.

(It seems like such a long time until you think about how early you have to be to the airport, and how long you have to sit. At a train station, you can roll in two minutes prior to scheduled departure, and not one single person is going to even think about groping you. You can leave your shoes on, too, and bring your coffee cup straight onto the train. Mom and Dad take overnight trains a lot and pack their own apertifs, and so they can sit sipping Kahlua and watching the landscape roll by, of an evening. You just have to have flexible plans awaiting you at the other end, and of course the train station is never anywhere near where you actually need go to.)

In completely other news, I actually attended my first-ever bluegrass jam session last night, which had an audience of like, forty people, which I hadn’t expected, and I took lead on precisely 0 songs but I did get to sing “Wayfaring Stranger” and prove to my teacher that I do know at least one song he knows– it’s been a source of continual wonder for me that having grown up amassing repertoires of songs to sing at sessions, I know enough music to continually sing without pause or repeat for over four hours, and yet I know 0 of the songs he’s taught us. Turns out the bluegrass repertoire is fairly distinct from folk, Irish, and cultural osmosis, which are my usual sources.

I am resolved to bring my banjo with me on the train, with an eye toward remembering to practice it at the farm, and we’ll see whether it’s worth it. Again, I curse myself for actually buying a bluegrass banjo with a resonator, when Dude has a lovely old-time one that’s compatible in every way but quieter and weighs literally three or four pounds, while mine weighs twenty or thirty. I get that if I’m learning bluegrass the banjo should match it, but it is a pain to bring around. And Dude never brings his anywhere so he should swap with me but he won’t because he likes his better. Oh well!

I will not play my banjo on the train, though, because I don’t know any train songs and also I don’t want to be thrown off. The other downside of a bluegrass banjo is that even with a mute on it it’s not quiet. (Open-back banjos, you can literally stuff a sock into, but bluegrass ones– well, you can take the resonator off but it requires tools and I don’t know if the instrument can still be played at that point.)

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this song is really genuinely called “Ol’ Slewfoot” and it is about a bear and I am expected to learn it by Thursday

I tried to look up a recording of the song so I’d have some context, as I only have the A part in my sheet music, and I got this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiqsjFKjSPc

uhhh enjoy that? (don’t worry, that guy’s not really naked, he’s in running shorts, it winds up pretty PG, no he doesn’t fuck the bear which I was honestly sort of worried about)
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I bought a banjo! photos behind cut.

On clearance at the music store, scratch + dent plus the manufacturer discontinued it.

It’s pretty:

If anyone cares, it’s a resonator banjo, meaning it’s got a closed back with a flange that protrudes around the front so that the sound is reflected back out of the instrument, and a tone ring inside– a heavy cast metal ring that goes around the edges of the round part to dampen vibrations so the strings don’t ring a long time, which is important for fast-picking styles of play like bluegrass.

I bought it largely because the price was right, it was pretty, and it felt nice to play. The strings are a little grotty, it was clearly on the sales floor for a while, but replacements are five bucks, and maybe we can arrange with the teacher to give us a lesson on replacing them. (Or consult YouTube. Anyway I’m not that worried about them yet.)

Most importantly, Chita approves.

Anyway, now Dude and I have a banjo apiece, I can bring mine with me and practice at the farm, and I guess we should decide what kinds of music we want to learn. I’m not super-invested in bluegrass as a concept, but it’s not a bad genre overall, and that’s the style of picking we could find a teacher for, so.
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I bought a banjo! photos at Tumblr, plus one pasted here for Dreamwidth purposes:

On clearance at the music store, scratch + dent plus the manufacturer discontinued it.

It’s pretty:

If anyone cares, it’s a resonator banjo, meaning it’s got a closed back with a flange that protrudes around the front so that the sound is reflected back out of the instrument, and a tone ring inside– a heavy cast metal ring that goes around the edges of the round part to dampen vibrations so the strings don’t ring a long time, which is important for fast-picking styles of play like bluegrass.

I bought it largely because the price was right, it was pretty, and it felt nice to play. The strings are a little grotty, it was clearly on the sales floor for a while, but replacements are five bucks, and maybe we can arrange with the teacher to give us a lesson on replacing them. (Or consult YouTube. Anyway I’m not that worried about them yet.)

Most importantly, Chita approves.

Anyway, now Dude and I have a banjo apiece, I can bring mine with me and practice at the farm, and I guess we should decide what kinds of music we want to learn. I’m not super-invested in bluegrass as a concept, but it’s not a bad genre overall, and that’s the style of picking we could find a teacher for, so.
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So. 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.
( banjo nerdery )
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 ~~world 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.)

"Bela Fleck And Abigail Washburn: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert" (Watch on YouTube)

This is the duo I saw in concert last night doing an NPR Tiny Desk Concert some time a year or two ago-- the child Abigail's pregnant with in this concert is 10 months old now, and as she charmingly described him during some of their patter, he is "a fatty. Can't find a chin on him for the life of us," as contrasted to the five year old who is now all long and child-y "and no waddle left in him"-- this was in the context of introducing a song they'd written about how fast time moves. (Watching the video, her voice is a little weaker and breathier than it was last night-- looks like she's at the stage of pregnancy where her lungs are a bit compressed, and I'm impressed she still did the clogging song. Now she is sort of a sweet little waif in a lace handkerchief-hem dress, and I'm refusing to consider whether she's younger than me.) (Their banter was about like this, though.)

It was a lot of songs off their album, but it was lovely to have the introductions and contexts. Abigail, on some of her earlier albums, has sung songs in Mandarin, and she explained one of them-- she'd majored in it in university, and took up banjo afterward, and so the second song she ever wrote was in Mandarin, and she explained the poem it was based upon, a Classical Chinese meditation of a woman looking at the yarn she'd knit her now-absent son a garment from, and then she concluded "so this song has nothing to do with that poem," and then as she sang the first few lines, she translated them as she played the instrumental licks between them.

As Dude and I came in and sat down, the woman in the chair in front of us looked at us and said, by way of greeting, "You're the youngest people here!" Ed note: We are not notably young. Also, for the record, there were a handful of other people under 40 present, including one twentysomething in a fantastic knee-length poofy dress with petticoat and some very demure ankle boots, I quite liked her aesthetic but I only saw her fleetingly.

Apart from that, yeah, it was a lot of older folks. Not entirely white, but quite.

(There was a hilarious schtick they did about how they met, which was a fictional story about how BanjoMingle Dot Com [which they singsonged in unison, it was quite funny] got hacked and accidentally paired them despite them having specifically requested other criteria in their acronym-laden profiles, which so far hasn't shown up in other videos of the two of them performing, so I'll mention here that it was goofily amusing. Though the part I liked best was not the actual punchline, it was that Béla described his sad lonely state, and Abigail said "she was just a lonely girl eating a lot of pints of mint chip lactose-free ice cream and watching Battlestar Galactica reruns" and Béla said "actually that sounds great" and she was like "actually it was, I don't know why I felt I needed to change that".)

In the audience, Dude and I discussed prior concert experiences-- we both used to go to shows a lot more when young. But he admitted he'd never been in a moshpit, and most of my show experience prior had been in pits. The reason is that my youngest, baby sister, in fact Farmsister, was super into punk and hardcore when she was about 15 or 16, and I was about 20, and there were concerts she wanted to go to that Mom wouldn't let her attend, but I could go, so I volunteered to chaperone her. And so I spent a bunch of those summers home from college going to punk shows with my baby sister and getting in fights with people who tried to bother her. And I'd sort of forgotten about that, but it's a lot of the shows I went to. Meanwhile Dude, living alone in NYC, went to a lot of like, jazz clubs where you paid a $3 cover and sat next to the piano bench with the bottle of beer you brought in and listened to a guy humming along with his own improv solo.

So-- different lives, there. It did solidify my resolution that I have to buy my own banjo, though; I'm going to the farm tomorrow after tonight's lesson ,and I'll be back in a week in time to go to the next lesson, but I won't have had access to an instrument to practice at all in that time, so. *shrug*