The Glory-Beaming Banjo

One of my goals for 2019 is to get back to recording my own playing. Recording yourself is a common suggestion for improving musicianship, but it's something I've gotten away from in the last couple years. The last time I recorded myself was in 2017. I've had this Zoom H2 digital recorder since about 2010, but it has lain unused for the last few years as my phone's voice recorder became my gear of choice. The results were fine, but limited. The Zoom H2 has far better dynamic range, and way more storage capacity. The biggest benefit is I can set it and (try to) forget it. Last week, I dusted off my H2 and recorded a portion of my practice session, running through 10 tunes as a baseline to see where I stand for 2019 and pinpoint areas for improvement. Upon listening to the results, my immediate impression was I tend to play too fast, which I suspect led to my other two problems: muddy phrasing and uneven rhythm. My intonation seemed OK for the most part, except ...

Happy New Year! Welcome back to Glory-Beaming Banjo. Last year ended on a positive note, and 2019 brings the promise of hope for another strong year of playing music and writing these here blog posts. With a bit of a hurdle yet to clear before 2018 ran out, I managed to surpass both of my playing time goals and end the year with a 50-day playing streak. I feel reasonably good about the tunes I learned last year, but I do still need to work on refining them. This year, I'm hoping to increase my playing time goals for banjo and fiddle and learn some more tunes, but I'm taking a break from the Ward Jarvis catalog . Instead, I'll be tackling some overlooked chestnuts as a means to improve my rhythm and expand my jam-friendly repertoire. When I started on the fiddle , I had little interest in learning the common tunes I already played on banjo. I jumped from Wayne Erbsen's Old-Time Fiddle for the Complete Ignoramus to Brad Leftwich's more complex bowing pattern...