Wednesday, February 28, 2024

in which musicians look at me funny.

I went to Wintergrass last week, in Bellevue, WA, spitting distance from Seattle. My many, many, many trips to Sea-Tac Airport were mostly for work, with only so much free time and energy for going places. So I’d never been to Bellevue. I spent the whole time in the downtown office-buildings-and-hotels kind of area, so arguably I still haven’t been to Bellevue. I hope there’s more to it than that.

Wintergrass is, surprisingly enough, a (mostly) bluegrass-focused festival, in the winter. The days are full of workshops, and the afternoons and nights are full of concerts. I mostly went because the Internet told me Le Vent du Nord was performing, and also Genticorum. The Quebecois bands don’t come to this coast much—who can blame them?—and at this point I’ve met a couple handfuls of people likely to be there, so it seemed promising.

It was fun! It’s still depressing to be around such high-level groups and have such a hard time joining in, the same as at Fiddle Tunes in 2019; I found a beginners-friendly subgroup, and eventually realized I should have just been with them all week. I have some perception stuff that makes music extra challenging, and one of them is that I don’t have a strong working memory for audio, and I can have a hard time determining figuring out what note someone else is playing. For example, say I’m trying to suss out a tune a group is playing: I’ll have a hard time figuring out the starting note. I do okay after that, but also I can have a hard time hearing which pitch is higher or lower,  and also I have a hard time hearing or singing or playing octaves.

I noticed something as I would talk to people. I have 6 violins (I think), and my two favorites are the "actually quite nice but still made in China for a certain price point," and the "absolutely stunning, much more expensive handmade in the U.S. by a master of the craft," both 5-strings. I bought the Very Nice Violin through a guy in SF who I met at Fiddle Tunes 2019, who introduced me to various folks as "the guy who bought the Very Nice Violin." (I have #4 of that model, and I got to play #5, which seemed about the same, but I’d need them next to each other to know.)

Then I tell people that I brought the Picnic Violin, because the Very Nice Violin hasn’t left the house yet and I would just be anxious traveling with it. I love the Picnic Violin, but it’s a commodity instrument, easily replaced.

And then some people look at me oddly. I think so many of them are professional musicians, they had some difficulty understanding that I would not bring my favorite instrument to this week where I would be learning and sharing music. It’s their companion for expressing themselves. It’s not like mine isn’t, but one of its gifts has been to help me be a better player, so I can get a great sound out of the Picnic Violin, and use it to learn on.

(In the beginner-friendly subgroup, one of the coaches said I was getting a really good bluegrass tone out of it. I started to say "Yeah, I like—" and he said, "No, you’re getting a really good sound." I should probably have that embroidered and hung on the wall.)

It’s nice to be home, though. The Very Nice Violin just has…more, of whatever quality you’d imagine. Responsiveness, volume, depth, anything. It’s just…more.

I’ll leave the house with it someday. But not yet.

Friday, January 5, 2024

I CAN HELP

When I was a kid, and as I grew up, I thought a lot about what I'm really good at, and what I enjoy. As mentioned elsewhere, I've picked up a motley assortment of skills—a few I grew up with, but mostly it's been in my teens and beyond. What do I take to easily? What lights me up and gets me excited? What keeps me interested? How do those change over time?

My hobby, and my gift, is just "learning stuff." Which is weird. More typically, people find things to dig into, and keep digging—often decades, or a lifetime. Whenever I tell someone about machining, they say "What are you going to make?," which is a reasonable question, since most folks will pick up skills for a purpose.

I, on the other hand, get curious about how something is done, acquire a basic competency in it, and at some point I drift away and find something else. It's definitely an ADHD thing, same as how I'm always in the middle of a couple dozen books at a time, where I'll read a few pages before needing to switch books. This is a superpower, especially when combined with my other skills, and winning Brain Yahtzee with the high-intelligence genes that are visited, with the most absurd intensity, on both sides of my family tree.

(There are exceptions. I would be in my third decade of aikido, if my health had let me continue. I'm 7 years into the violin. For whatever it's worth, for those, I did have purposes in mind.)

One source of novelty has been the flow of musical instruments into and out of—mostly in—the household. I don't buy instruments on impulse; I spend a lot of time understanding what sound or experience I'm trying to get, and if I can't do it with the existing zoo of instruments. I do buy them regularly, but each one has had years of thinking and pondering behind it.

I love buying musical instruments so much, I get really excited about helping other people have instruments, whether buying one for them (Honor’s ukulele, my niece’s 7/8-scale violin) or pointing them in the right direction. Around here, my advice for acoustic instruments is "go to Gryphon and tell them what you need," since they’ve added lower price ranges over the past 15 years or so, as carefully-curated imports have gotten better, even as prices have been static-ish. There’s a lot of really amazing work coming out of China, South Korea, and Indonesia: Paul Reed Smith’s budget SE line, for example, started production in South Korea, but now they’re made in Indonesia and the improved quality is remarkable. Outfits like Fiddlershop or Acoustic Electric Strings work closely with the overseas import shops, checking out samples and making sure the output is up to snuff. And it’s humbling to discover that many parts of Asia have been making Western-origin instruments since before any of my late grandparents were born.

I love how accessible and downright good instruments are now. From a colonialism and globalization perspective…maybe not so great. But it enables people to make music, and that’s always worth feeling grateful for.

Saturday, December 30, 2023

pfeh.

The job I wanted fell through last week: I assume they have a funding squeeze (real or imagined, probably passed down from the Board). It was a really good fit, too, in terms of shared principles, with lots of room to grow over time. But here we are, and no one will do any hiring until they sober up from New Year’s, so it’s a good time to bang on my various projects. One in particular, building a sort of rolling practice cabinet so I can have multiple violins out of their cases at once, feels ambitious but doable, since I can use the goodies down at the makerspace.

Of course, I was down there yesterday afternoon, failing to make a relatively simple jig to sharpen my chisels and plane irons. I think part of the secret sauce is to just buy actual wood and then build the thing, instead of trying to economize with scrap wood. And

It’s raining again, which is delightful in itself and sorely needed in general, but also we had a lot of epic flooding last year, areas of the city we didn’t know could flood: we were supposed to go to a friend’s house for dinner on New Year’s Eve—only a couple miles away, but as we watched the news and alerts, it became clear that even if we could get there, we wouldn’t be able to get back.

So maybe not all the rain at once.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

PROJECTS

One of my pretty durable hobbies—I’m pretty sure I’ll keep doing it as long as my body holds out—is music, for which I have acquired a fine set of instruments and other tools. I have such good taste that the two instruments I’ve sold to my favorite music shop in Berkeley were immediately sold to the same guy—the first one while I was still in the store. Not particularly expensive taste, but very good, and I love buying instruments so much that I get really excited about helping other people buy instruments, because I only buy what I think I’ll play, and I (eventually) get rid of whatever I don’t.

But, with ADHD brain, I often want to use a bunch of instruments in sequence: guitars or mandolins or fiddles or whatever. Occasionally I have non-ADHD desires to hear how something will sound on a different fiddle, but mostly it’s ADHD. Similarly, getting things out of their cases takes up a lot of space and means I don’t play them as much; that, plus the fact they’re pretty, are why we have a house full of display cases. But for sitting down and playing, I want instruments right there, without taking up the square footage needed for all the cases. Just the guitar stand and music stand take up a ton of floor space.

…I can just build something. I’m all certified for the woodshop tools at the local makerspace. I’d used, and often owned, everything except the jointer, planer, and router. It had been a minute since I used a table saw, and they’re more hazardous than I remember—although they have a SawStop, an absolutely incredible safety innovation. Few things focus my attention like sharp objects, and the more dangerous, the greater the focus. They have a simple logic to them that makes for straightforward rules:
  • It can’t cut anything it’s not touching.
  • Edges can only cut along one axis.
  • Blades attached to motors are more dangerous.
So you can roll out corollaries like:
  • Keep everything about yourself as far away from the cutting action of the blade as you possibly can.
Anyway. I own a bunch of tools, and have access to a bunch more, and I can probably manage to knock together a stable, rolling furniture…thing. Cubbyholes to safely hold violins. Pegs or a flat drawer for bows. Sheet music storage. Some kind of music stand facility that is not a music stand.

This is a thing that has to be designed, so I went and measured the violins and viola. The 5-string I got over the summer is a beast: the older one is the same length and width (620mm x 220mm), but the height on the newer one is 120mm to the old one’s 90mm. It’s basically a small viola, which is of course why the C string is so delightful. I have a single regular 4-string violin, and it is absolutely adorably tiny by comparison.

I’m also working on a mute for 5-strings, since such a thing doesn’t exist. Not that it can’t be done, it’s just been waiting for someone who both plays 5-strings and also knows how to shape metal. Or me, at any rate. I made a dodgy mute years ago by taking two double-stacks of dime-sized magnets, assembled with gaffer’s tape, one on each side of the bridge, and the mass dampens the bridge vibrations. It’s not great to mess around with your bridge if you don’t have to, though, and it’s just so…inelegant. "Crufty," we would say in software development. Sure, it works, but it’s far from the best idea and not exactly something you want to put your name on.

This is my favorite mass-damper design:


Besides the charming wood camouflage, it’s identical halves, bolted together. There are a few ways to go about fabricating it, but probably roughing it out on the bandsaw is fastest, drill the holes, then cut the fingers with a mill. I have a 4"x4" brick of aluminum that’s just been waiting for a project, and I can prototype in aluminum with my tools at home, even as neglected and unaligned as they are.

Whenever I get motivated to learn 3D modeling, I can share the design out and people can finally make their own…

Sunday, November 26, 2023

turns out I love my work.

I’ve been interviewing with a couple companies, which I’ve actually enjoyed! They’ve asked good questions, like "How did you get started in management?", to which the answer is "Let me tell you about college a cappella groups…". This past year has let me make my story coherent enough that I can plausibly talk about my life before Computer Science 101, which itself happened where the Internet was so far along that there were a whole six (6) of we avant-garde who had websites.

I do love working with computers, and I’m an excellent software engineer. I just love working with people more, and I’m better at it. Software development is an utterly human endeavor, and it depends entirely on we squishy, analog humans communicating. We exist as systems on so many levels: cultures, communities, guilds, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, ecosystems, microbiomes, tissue cells. Workplaces, chat rooms, housemates, marriages, friendships, families, minds.

I can see those systems, and I can help people be awesome. And, as a role, being in management makes sense to me, which is not always the case.

I hired an engineer onto a very specifically particular team, but the team and the organization were involved in some slogging work, and they quite rightly brought this up in a 1-1 after a couple months.

"I feel like there are decisions being made where I can’t see them, in meetings I’m not invited to. Am I being paranoid?"
 "No, you are absolutely correct, we have these meetings about The Project, and we can read you into it if you want, but they are meetings which have made both me and Matt visibly angry."
[Matt is justifiably legendary for his patience and kindness, and while I’m no slouch in the patience-and-kindness department, it is known that me getting visibly angry takes a lot.]

"Oh. Shit. Okay. Never mind."

Patrick Rothfuss’s masterwork The Wise Man’s Fear gets its title from a saying in that world:

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."

Managers can be extremely non-creative, partly because they don’t know what else to be, but also because there’s a sad mode of management where the job is being a "bullshit umbrella," protecting teams from the rest of the company. At large companies this is most commonly all you’re allowed to do, unless you also enjoy throwing elbows in institutional—let’s say bureaucratic—politics (which some people do). But it’s so much more fun to treat it like a collaboration with the engineers, because the two jobs are radically different: woe be unto ye whose only way to promote an engineer is to make them a manager.

So, sure, see what I did there? I’m not hiding anything, and I’ll be as transparent as I can, but no one with good sense wants to deal with work which is not their job, which is making multiple gentle men angry.

Friday, October 27, 2023

smaller world than I thought.

I got to hang out a bit with a local fiddler, who’s selling a Very Nice Violin and dropped it at the house for me to try overnight. This kind of loan is common with orchestral strings and bows, often up to a few weeks, because tradition aside, you need to hear the instrument in the places and contexts you would be playing it. Plus, no one wants to (or can) deal with payments and refunds even for $10,000, let alone $100,000 and up. People will take photocopy your driver’s license, and maybe sign a receipt, but overall an honor system that goes bad relatively rarely, all things considered.

This Very Nice Violin was a 2010 and actually just been refitted by an extraordinarily gifted and energetic luthier who manages to be at every folk music-related event in North America, living in San Francisco or Nashville in between. That luthier knows me, so we had that point of connection.

We got to talking about what music I play, so Swedish/Scandi music came up, and I pointed him to Timbre Folk & Baroque as the only place in driving distance to try and buy Scandi instruments. I mentioned this guy down in L.A., who’s a lawyer, but also a pro-quality musician, who’s already been down this kind of Scandi music rabbit hole, and the seller and I took a minute to come up with his name, as the seller said "I should know this, he’s dating my friend L—…".

(I met them both when I was in Bellingham last year, as they turned out to be staying above the cat-free Airbnb I rented to replace the cat-inhabited one. They’re very nice, and fabulous musicians together.)

So then we were talking about the nyckelharpa.
"A friend of mine is moving to Sweden to study it!"
"Amy H—?"
"Yeah!"
I would be stunned if Amy remembered me, because we met at the Fiddle Tunes festival before the pandemic, where she was one of the instructors. The owner of Timbre Folk—who seems to know every professional player of Swedish music that has passed through the Bay Area in the past thirty years—called her "Probably the best nyckelharpa player on this side of the ocean."

(I passed on the Very Nice Violin. Just not the one for me.)

On the one hand, I wish so many people could make a living playing music that it was a crowd of strangers.

On the other hand…this is what community looks like.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

that new-violin smell.

Seriously, though, I can still smell the varnish. I think it was finished a week or two before I picked it up.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, one cognitive challenge we have is the genuinely alarming angles we have to tilt over in a curve. It’s freaky, and 100% necessary.

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Motorcycle tires are an amazing technology, and the truth is that on pure dry pavement, and often wet as well, tires will grip really well at extreme angles. That’s why motorcycle tires have a round profile, instead of a car’s square profile.

So we tell each other: go ahead and lean the bike. The tires are better than you are.

This violin is better than me. I learn just by playing it. It has more dynamic range (quiet/loud), more depth of sound, crystal-clear high notes, a much more powerful (i.e. viola-like) C string. I know it makes me a better violinist because when I go back to any of my factory violins, I play them better as well.

It’s just very nice, and I love it.