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I posted a couple of pics here
And wrote a review here

Both are on the Café Message Board.

Daniel

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!

Especially if it's the FedEx driver!

(MacBeth Scene 4, Act 1)

More on this in a week. I hope I can stand it!

Daniel

So I've been shaking off the rust lately (see my last entry) by reconvening the regular Friday jam session, getting back to Wednesday night practices, and taking the mandolin to work. And it's all beginning to pay off.

The Friday jam sessions are fiddle tune heavy. We have a fiddler/mandolin player who loves the old timey stuff and Texas Swing too. We've been working on "Pig Ankle Rag" recently. Which is an interesting tune. It doesn't sound difficult, but the return ...

Now I know what Neil Young meant when he used the phrase to title a live album. Well, maybe that's presumptuous... Let's say I've discovered one of the possible meanings of the phrase.

On Wednesday night, I attended the first practice we, Zero Visibility String Band, have had in a few weeks. I've cut down the playing time this month for a number of reasons, some of them were not in my control. But the result is the same: Rust

Wednesday night we played a lot of fiddle ...

I spent three days at NAMM paying attention to as much as possible, trying not to succumb to input overload. Discovered many things I liked and noted a lot that just seemed odd. But getting mandolin info was pretty easy. There were very few mandolins on hand. I have to admit that I skipped a few makers who have mandolin lines. So, what follows is --in alphabetical order-- an incomplete account of mandolins at NAMM.

Tone was universally difficult to evaluate. The main floor was ...

Ahh, there's nothing like the annual lure of (no longer) Orange County Calif in January. The haze, the freeways, the concrete, the asthma attacks, NAMM.

This year will be my first visit to the auditory and visual bombardment that is the convention of the National Association of Music Merchants. So I'll be attempting to take enough notes to post something coherent here. But maybe I'll settle for writing about how incoherent NAMM was.


Only time will ...

The pedal board is versatile, useful, and for the time being complete.

The next thing I need to work on is one of the instruments. I love the Altered Tele enough to turn it back into a standard guitar, so I'd like to get something I can tune to 5ths.

I've already tweaked the Mandobird by turning it into mandola. So I need something more akin to a mandolin. I'm thinking an 18" scale length, 5 strings, and tuned as an octave mandolin with a high B string.
...

I'm really glad I grew up in the era preceding the advent of the internet or I would have been
tracking Santa Claus all day every Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas to you all and I hope Santa brings you cool new mandolin items!

Daniel

Went to a Christmas party on Friday night. It was potluck which means lots of food spread around and open to the air. It was also packed for a good long while, and I heard at least 2 or 3 people sneezing pretty hard.

Sunday night (12/14/08), I came down with the flu. Fever, chills, coughing, sneezing, aching, head stuffed tight with goo. Bed ridden for 2 days. I stayed away from all musical instruments until today (12/20/08).

Got out my Gary Vessel F5 and played ...