The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Shall we just rip the Band-Aid off? I'm not going to make my overall playing time goal in 2022 . This has been an especially up-and-down year, as I've gone through equal measures of glut and famine when it comes to my musical endeavors.  My main goal this year was to get back into good practice habits. Unfortunately, I've struggled to find consistency.  I knew at the outset that aiming for a combined 250 hours of playing time on banjo and fiddle was a foolhardy mission. As of this writing, I'm three hours short of even reaching the halfway mark on my goal. With just two days remaining in 2022, it's pretty clear I won't even achieve half of my goal.  Despite my struggles this year, I'm not all doom and gloom about my playing. I've made some excellent progress with Michael Ismerio's All-Access Online Fiddle Course , learning 10 new tunes over the past 12 months.  On banjo, I have only learned four new tunes, but I've also tried to continue to get m...

This has been a challenging year for my musical goals. While on the one hand I've learned several new tunes this year and was able to attend a couple festivals, but I've fallen well short of my playing time goals and have gone long stretches without playing any music at all. After a hiatus of almost six weeks between October and November, I've made the effort to recommit myself to banjo and fiddle.  Throughout my musical journey, I've had many instances where I felt like I was restarting. As we all know, unless you're a professional musician, life has a way of interrupting hobbies.  Like I mentioned in a previous post , I decided to train for a long-distance trail race at the end of July, something I hadn't done in over a decade. That took up a lot of my free time earlier in the year, and I've just had a hard time finding consistency in my practice time for banjo and fiddle.  In some ways, I feel a sense of guilt for not playing as much as I think I should. ...

Before I fell in the love with the banjo, I was a book lover. I mean, I still am. But when I was in college, I took so many literature classes for fun that I amassed enough credits to earn a dual degree in English, along with my bachelor's in journalism.  I was raised in a house of reader parents. My mom is the kind of woman who checks out a stack of books at a time from the library. My dad also reads constantly, usually history or mystery, but at a much slower rate. My love of books developed slowly. My appetite for reading was sparked when I began collecting comic books in the early 1990s, then graduated to graphic novels, then my love for Star Wars led me to the Expanded Universe novels, and finally I began to read the almighty ...  LITERATURE!   From high school onward, I have never not been in the middle of some book. Naturally, when I became interested in the banjo, I not only began amassing a large collection of associated music, but I also started compiling a stac...

Highlights from my vinyl collection have been few and far between recently on this blog. My last entry in this series came back in February last year. Well, I have an exciting addition to share today.  You may recall I had a bit of an obsession a few years back with Ward Jarvis. I dubbed 2017 as The Year of Ward Jarvis . And in that initial declaration, I identified three records I was hoping to track down. I managed to acquire one of them, Visits , by the end of that year. That left two albums on my wish list.  Well, now only one remains. This week I received the long sought after Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music , released in 1979 by the Ohio Arts Council and featuring recordings of Ward Jarvis and his sons, collected by the late David Brose .  I was so happy to find a copy of this album. I was starting to lose hope after a series of near-misses and then seeing some copies being listed online for as high as $200. However, patience paid off. I had set an alert on eBay...

Music Along the River, Aug. 12-13, in Harpersfield, Ohio, proved to be a fun time. However, it turned out to be my only opportunity to play old-time music with others this month. Parking challenges canceled out one event and a scheduling conflict eliminated another.  As I mentioned in my previous post , August was a busy month. There was the aforementioned Music Along the River, the Raccoon County Music Festival in Burton, Ohio, as well as a new jam in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood that offered ample opportunities to play banjo and fiddle with other likeminded folks.  On Saturday, Aug. 13, I drove north to the site of the Harpersfield Covered Bridge , which has been removed and will be rehabilitated as part of a construction project approved earlier this year that is estimated to cost more than $6 million and be completed by Dec. 31, 2023.  In past years, Music Along the River (or MATR, as it's affectionately referred to by festivalgoers) spans both sides of the Gra...

Summer brings festival season. Clifftop and Galax are just around the corner, but there are a slew of events coming up that are closer to home where there will be plenty of old-time jamming to enjoy. Meanwhile, I'm still struggling to find time to play music amid other summertime activities.  July and August are especially busy for Northeast Ohio's old-time music community, with a full slate of events packed into a tight window. I'm sad to say I missed Music in the Valley earlier this month, but there are two more festivals to look forward to next month. Following the disruptions to events the last two years from the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems like especially challenging time for organizers. It was such a welcome experience to return to the Lake Erie Folk Festival in April. I hope the rest of the local events experience plenty of success to bolster them for the future.  This is a good reminder to show support for the things you enjoy, or they might not be around muc...

Summer brings warm weather and music festivals, but also a bevy of activities to eat up my time. It's been a struggle to make space for playing banjo and fiddle the past two months.  As some readers might recall, I used to run a lot. In fact, this blog grew out of my now-defunct running blog . In my B.C. life (i.e., before child), I ran a handful of marathons, several half marathons and dozens of other races.  However, that all came to a screeching halt when my son arrived in 2013. I ran sparingly over the next several years as parenthood took centerstage. Last year, my friends coaxed me into running a race for the first time in nine years. That resulted in running my highest mileage since 2012, plus a sprained foot after running my second race.  As of this month, I've already surpassed last year's total mileage, as those same friends recruited me to run a leg of the Burning River 100  for part of an eight-member relay team.  Between running five days a week, ya...

Over this past weekend, I learned that old-time musician Christian Wig died on April 21. Born on Dec. 12, 1949, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, he became immersed in the folk music scene in Northeast Ohio during the 1970s. Throughout the next few decades, Wig would play in a number of folk and old-time bands, including the Blue Eagle String Band, North Fork Rounders, Boiled Buzzards, the Mustel House Muskrats (a reference to the Mustill Store in Akron) and others. Wig also released a series of solo albums.  Known more for his fiddling, Wig actually started on banjo. According to his website , he got a Bacon resonator banjo in 1969 and began learning from Pete Seeger's book. He later got an album by Art Rosenbaum, which inspired him to learn clawhammer style. However, he had trouble figuring it out until he met Stan Werbin, the future proprietor of Elderly Instruments . Wig wrote that Werbin was a friend of his cousin's at the University of Michigan, where Wig was visiting in 1971....

Look, we've all heard that it's a good idea to record yourself playing music so you can gauge your progress. My problem has always been planning to record myself maybe once every few months and then failing to follow through. However, over the last six weeks, I've been a pretty good streak.  I have recorded myself on banjo or fiddle seven times since Feb. 9. Good or bad, I've also been sharing my videos on my Instagram account, which kind of makes it feel like there are stakes involved. I already don't like recording myself, but now there's that feeling like THIS IS A PERFORMANCE FOR MY FOLLOWERS. But let's be real, I get about 30 views and maybe 10 likes when I post these videos, so it's not big stakes. But it's enough to keep me working hard to play well. A big thing for me is I'm not recording multiple takes to get it perfect. If I get through the tune without going off the rails, then that's the one I post. If I need more than three attem...

This month, I received two bits of good news related to my local old-time music community. The news has led me to find a decent groove this month playing banjo and fiddle.  Two of my favorite local festivals announced they will return this year after having been canceled the last two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  First, the Lake Erie Folk Festival (LEFF) announced it will return to the Shore Cultural Center in Euclid, Ohio, on April 30. This festival was actually the last musical event I attended before everything shut down . I had interviewed organizer Laura Lewis prior to the festival for its fifth anniversary.  LEFF only missed 2021, due to the pandemic. Usually held in February as a way to scare away the winter doldrums in Northeast Ohio, the organizers moved the event to April to avoid spikes in pandemic numbers.  Second, the Raccoon County Music Festival announced it too would be coming back this year, returning to Century Village in Burton, Ohio,...

Last year was a challenging year when it comes to my banjo and fiddle playing goals. After hitting what I think was a significant milestone in reaching 500 days in a row of playing my instruments, I took a break. That break turned into a hiatus.  Ending my daily habit went from celebrating a major achievement to lamenting my demotivation . My positive turned into a negative. For 2022, my goal is to reverse that trend and get back into good musical habits.  The good news is December ended with an eight-day playing streak and by tying my highest monthly practice time for 2021. Now the challenge is to continue those positive vibes for this year and get back on track with my banjo and fiddle goals. The March to 10,000 Hours If you've been following the blog for a little while, you'll know that I track my banjo and fiddle playing time as a means to keep myself accountable to my goals. Although the 10,000-hour theory has come under scrutiny, reaching that vaunted milestone in my l...