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 ...

Once upon a time, there was a robust folk festival on the campus of Kent State University, in my hometown of Kent, Ohio. I remember going as a kid, and at least once for a school field trip. There were concerts and workshops devoted to all strains of folk music in America and abroad. That was my first exposure to the  Kent State Folk Festival . My fondest memories of the event came much later. I started playing the banjo in 2008, but didn't start focusing on old-time music until 2009. That year, I learned there was a clawhammer banjo workshop in my old hometown at my alma mater by some guy named Mark Olitsky . So I went. And my jaw fell out of my face and hit the ground with a thud of realization that I had A LOT to learn about playing the banjo. The next year, I returned to the Kent State Folk Festival to attend Olitsky's workshop again. By then, I had swapped my resonator banjo for an open-back built by a local maker and had just started attending a local old-time s...

After I launched my last post , I decided on a whim to redesign the blog site. Do you like it? I do. I hope you do. If you don't ... sorry? You may have noticed that some things have changed or moved around a bit, so I figured I'd give you a quick tour. The newest addition that you will find is a link to subscribe to my blog by email. Look up in the righthand corner for the word "Subscribe," next to the "Search" and menu links. Click the link, and a screen will pop up for you to enter your email address. Voila! Now, new posts will show up in your inbox. Someone asked me about a subscription option a few months ago, and I finally figured out how to add it. Next is a feature that was part of the last design, but maybe you didn't know what it was, and that's the menu. Again, in the upper right corner, you'll find three horizontal lines, which you are just supposed to know are for the menu. If you click that, a sidebar will appear with a ...

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...