The Glory-Beaming Banjo

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...

Hello, is anyone still with me? This is not the publishing schedule I envisioned for this blog's 10th anniversary . Somehow it's been eight months since my last post . Even worse, after ending my epic streak of playing my instruments every day for almost a year and a half, my practice time lost all sense of consistency.  In fact, I have barely played music at all since July. Without open jams or local festivals, I seem to have lost my motivation to practice. I used to take my fiddle with me to the office and play in the park down the street during my lunch break. Now that I only go in once a week, I just don't feel like dragging along my gear to work anymore.  Being at home so much the past two years, you would think that I'd find more opportunities to pick up my banjo or fiddle. That has not been the case. I think last year, there was more focus on staying connected to the old-time community virtually, through online jams, workshops and performances. After another yea...

Last month I ended my 500-day streak of playing banjo and fiddle. I followed that with two and a half weeks of not playing banjo or fiddle. It seems during my break that my fingers have lost almost all of their calluses. They haven't been this tender in a long time.  During the past week, I've been getting myself back in the habit of playing music on a semi-daily basis. I've been focusing on playing for longer stretches, rather just a few minutes to keep a streak alive like I'd gotten used to doing.  It feels good to be out of that rut.  The biggest thing I want to get back to is learning new stuff. I'm continuing to work on Michael Ismerio's online fiddle course , and I've been revisiting Ken Perlman's Clawhammer Style Banjo , the book that helped get my started on old-time more than a decade ago. I'm also thinking of digging out Mike Seeger's Southern Banjo Styles videos.  I've been trying to approach my instruments with a beginner's ...

Thanks to the pandemic, my daily playing streak has reached an unbeatable (for me) 500 days in a row. With typical yearly travel obligations for work on hiatus since a year ago, I pushed my record to height that would have otherwise been impossible.  Quite frankly, over the last few months, my streak had started to almost feel like a weight on my shoulders. I've hardly played for longer that 5-10 minutes per day for a few weeks. I've been putting in the bare minimum to keep my streak alive.  In January, I decided I would make it to the nice round number of 500 and then take today off. Today, is that day off.  The idea of trying to play banjo and fiddle everyday, even if just for five minutes, came in 2018 . The merit of short bursts of practice was inspired by Tom Collins of Banjo Blitz fame (now Banjo Quest). I used to feel like if I couldn't fit in at least 30 minutes, then it wasn't worth it. When I reduced that threshold to five minutes, I suddenly found myself str...

David Brose died in January. I didn't know the man personally, but he had a significant impact on my journey into learning old-time music. Through his work as a folklorist, Brose was responsible for the bulk of the available recordings of Ward Jarvis, a fiddler and banjo player who lived in Athens County, Ohio.  While I was introduced to Ward Jarvis through the Field Recorders' Collective , the world of his fiddling and banjo playing really opened up to me when I received a copy of Brose's field recordings made in the mid- to late 1970s. Brose went on to produce two albums released in 1979 that featured Jarvis for Ohio Folklife and the Ohio Arts Council, Rats Won't Stay Where There's Music with his sons and Traditional Music Music From Central Ohio with a variety of other musicians from the region.  Thanks to these recordings, I was able to learn tunes like "Icy Mountain," "Tomahawk," "Pretty Little Indian" and others as part of my Ye...