What are y'all up to?
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Calling all Crickets and Gunnars: here’s the latest post to his site. He’s my good friend Larry Odham from TN. I love listening to him play guitar.
Oh cool, that was fun. He actually contacted me recently about sending me a few learning resources for Chet tunes.
Actually, I just arranged Grandfather’s clock in fingerstyle half inspired by this and the other half by Leroy Troy, it’s really fun to play!
Lots of stuff going on around here and now I have no time at all for anything. Hoping it all turns out ok. Right now a big mess…mess of troubles.
I can see I’m missin’ a bunch of good stuff on here…I’ll be back and try to catch up…if it’s not one thing it’s another…
Jim, I have seen that one on FB and it seems to be the truth, doesn’t it? Fred, your pickin’ buddy sounds so, so CHET! Very nice pickin’. Surely he knows Eddie Pennington, from KY…there’s a small crowd who pick in that Chet way and Eddie is one of the organizers of their gatherings, etc. They call it thumbpicking and won’t let anybody else call their pickin’ thumbpickin’, because it’s just so different…kinda Merle Travis-like, but really more Chet. I thought it was gonna be Cherokee Shuffle…lol…then I realized apparently there is another tune, just Cherokee. He’s good!
Well, this morning I was awakened at 6:30 (three hours earlier than I usually awake ?) and informed that I had about 0 minutes to get dressed and go haul bags of concrete. My brother and I together hauled 20 fifty Kg bags (110 pounds) out of one stack, over to the door, out the door into a wheelbarrow and into another stack. It was really REALLY hard. Especially at that hour, my hands are so weak in the mornings, I’m surprised I even was able to do it. When I finally got done and back to life, I went and tried to play fiddle and it was so hard (and painful) I couldn’t play fast and I could barely hold strings down. And my fingernails (that I use for fingerstyle) feel dead now. Fortunately, that should be the last of the construction
Ouch… that’s heavy! We haul 80 lb bags of concrete and that gets my legs wobbly. I know all that hard work tightens up your hands and fingers…gotta stretch them out and wriggle them around some before you play to loosen ’em back up and prevent injury.
Seems there are times when trouble starts following us in our tracks and stuff gets overwhelming and difficult…that’s what’s going on here at the moment…tired of trouble…hope it goes away from us soon and we can get onto some sort of even keel, for a change.
Geez, Gunnar. That’s a lot of work after just getting out of bed! I can relate to your weakness and pain after that. Some days I move upwards of 6000 lbs. of cases for our home business. After that, I can’t even think of practicing I hurt so much. When I was your age (now 63), I used to sleep late too. Now, I am up and ready to go at 3:00am. I love getting up early. It is “my time” when no one else bothers me.
One thing I like about being retired is we don’t get up until around 7 these days…as much other stuff that’s outta control…at least it’s the latest we have ever gotten to sleep to…I’m not a morning person either, so 7 sounds pretty good to me. Then coffee…no work, no heavy stuff…I’m 66 and I’m an old granny…lol…gee whiz does it ever end? I don’t mind a lot of it, really…I mean, I have always enjoyed splitting logs for fire (which, unfortunately, we have no need to do anymore), digging…I mean, I’m a good digger, and I don’t mind shoveling…but I wasn’t in the mood for all the gravel we shoveled and then the tamping…do not enjoy that at all. Don’t like heavy lifting…not at all, especially up and down slippery and difficult sloping pathways…no, that ain’t no fun.
Anyway, guys…everybody who loves to play music…look up on youtube or google some therapeutic hand and finger stretching….even wrist and shoulder stretching and exercises to keep those areas loosened up and flexible, strong, etc. You can prevent playing injury, especially if you are doing a lot of manual labor, by keeping your hands in good working order. Sometimes I even do an exercise I made up on the guitar fretboard that loosens up my fingers to prevent playing injuries. Don’t want that! I also wear gloves to prevent pinching my fingers with heavy objects, protect important nails…just keep scratches and cuts down, etc. We need our hands!
My Fiddlerman Artist violin arrived today.
The first thing I noticed was the color of the violin. Unlike my Concert violin, the color is lighter, almost a honey and maple syrup coloring. I really like the way it looks. The only change I had them make was to replace the ebony Guarneri style chinrest with a ebony Flesch flat center model chin rest.
Concert violin on left – Artist violin on right
Now, off to play it!
Beautiful! Have you played it any yet? Congrats! I hope you love it! It is beautiful and inviting.
Well today are building fences at the top end of the wall so nobody goes ka-boom over the edge…whether it would be the dogs or one of us, or even school kids walking home from the bus who somehow for whatever reason decided to go jumping around our wall…lol…it’s a long way down. Building picket fences isn’t a hard job, but I just don’t want to be doing it…wanna be playing music or something exciting like that. But it’s gotta be done, so…that’s it…taking a coffee break and soon we will be back out there trying to finish up that part of the fence. We have a lot of re-“engineering” of our poor little front yard…we’re turning my former front yard garden into a driveway…so we and our daughter next door can get our cars off the one-lane/ no shoulder road, where drunk people regularly fly up and down and barely miss our cars on a regular basis…lol. Not to mention if we clear the snow in front of our houses and go somewhere, somebody has taken our parking spot by the time we get back and we find ourselves with no place to go. So anyhow, the driveway should alleviate those situations, although we tearfully cut down the little apple tree I started from a seed when I ate a Jonathan apple…to show grandson when they first moved in when he was 1…just show him something growing…I figured it wouldn’t ever bear apples…but it turned beautiful…he’s 9 now and climbed on it all the time until we cut it. Our little dog, Cricket has loved laying in the shade…it’s been home to mockingbirds, cardinals, and a stopping point for all kinds of birds…sadly, we cut it to make room for the driveway. There goes my major gardening spot too…but…hopefully it’ll be a good thing for us…then we can figure out how to put up the rest of the fences once we get all of the space figured out. I’d rather be fiddling!
Thanks Gunnar and Cricket. I played it for a while this afternoon. It has a mellower and slightly darker sound than the Concert violin. Nice!
Would love to see some updated pics of your project, Cricket.
I’m sure you will share the beautiful sound with us one of these days…I love a mellow fiddle…love that rich sound. I’ve never been a fan of the shrill sounds some fiddles can get.
Well I’ve taken some photos all along the way to send to my Dad because he likes to see updates, etc., but the angles and stuff…it’s hard to tell what’s what…it’s a cramped up area and hard to get in a good shot. I took some today and just now sent them to my dad…but they were awful…everything looked crooked and bad because you just can’t get it into a photo right. This is why when we first knew we needed to “tear down that wall,” and “build us a wall,” (quotes from two presidents…lol), we tried to hire out people…of course we figured we couodn’t afford it but wanted some estimates anyway just in case we could manage to work something out with somebody…none of them would even give us an estimate…you can’t get equipment in there…had to be done with shovels and stuff…the blocks had to be carried one at a time down there, through an area hard enough to walk through without carrying anything…etc. Nobody wanted to even give an estimate…so we figured we’d just have to do it ourselves…but let me look through the photos and see if any of them make good enough sense to somebody who’s never been there. I feel for our dogs…we basically took their whole yard away from them…now they have a tiny square of fencing for them just outside the front door…they won’t get that back because it’s becoming a driveway…but we are gonna try to figure out a way to give them some sort of protected little pathway to get from the front to the part behind where we’re parking and before the wall drops down…there’s a little area there that would give them more freedom to just move their legs…lol. We might be able to do something for them down in the back too, but they have trouble walking back there now because the hill is so bad for little chihuahuas…we’re gonna get chickens down there again too…so…I don’t know…it’s a tough area to figure out…lol.
About a week ago I switched back to playing my older fiddle.
Wow, so much touchier than the newer one!If I recall correctly it was about the same when I switched to the newer one exclusively about a year ago (or maybe two?).
It’s probably doing me good to have to adjust my playing so much…paying more attention to tone, intonation, pressure, speed, etc.
difference in tone is completely different in these two fiddles. older one has been re-graduated ( or hot-rodded) and has a far more “echoing” sound and can be overplayed really easily.
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