Fiddle Tunes

I finally went back to the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes! I went way back in 2019, and then didn’t, obviously. This time I rented a car and drove myself, which guaranteed that I had a ride—a problem I had last time—but I didn’t properly account for traffic. Much like the Bay Area, a trip I’d counted 2.5 hours for wound up more like 4.5. Unlike the Bay Area, I really love the landscape.

Not that the Pacific Northwest is monolithic, even if you stay west of the Cascades and the moisture it traps there. Port Townsend lies in the Olympic Rain Shadow, a term surely coined by real estate agents, but despite that, actually true.

When I worked for Chef, I had a lot of trips to Seattle, and over the years I’ve heard two kinds of Seattle residents (past, present, or future):

1. "It is so gray and rainy, it drives me nuts, especially the long winter nights."
2. "The weather here is actually fine, but don’t tell anyone, because then they’ll move here."

I’ve been to Seattle at all times of year, essentially randomly scattered through the seasons, and I gotta say, it does indeed seem fine. It rains sometimes. It’s overcast sometimes. It’s sunny sometimes. It’s hot sometimes. And the coffee is truly outstanding.

Playing the violin is a very emotionally fraught thing for me, and my brain has not yet found a way to learn tunes and still remember them the next day. I think next year’s solution is to bring a guitar, an instrument I’ve played for 30 years, and if I’m not amazing at it, I also know I can sit in a group and I don’t have to think about where B-minor is.

(Yes, I have a travel guitar in mind, which I do not yet own. This is me we’re talking about: I love shopping for instruments so much, I love helping other people shop for instruments. Once I think "guitar that’s pleasant to play, takes up little space, and likely to survive being checked baggage," there’s only one answer.)

I made it be more of a vacation: I had a really nice Airbnb to hang out in, and I got to see Rachel and Darren for the first time since 2019. I slept a lot. I made a friend or two. It was a good week, just…weird, because things are weird. The world is weird. This was a sort of normal thing to do. Which was weird.

Fort Worden is an incredible place to be; I feel like if I lived in town I would be spending a certain amount of time there. It’s one of three Army bases built to protect the opening to Puget Sound, but then we and our enemies all invented military aircraft, and suddenly the fort’s intended function was irrelevant. Eventually it was shuttered and then taken up as an arts center.

And, hey, if you’ve got a spare hangar for observation balloons, you can turn it into a concert hall, and have the giant doors open one side of the stage to the outside.

And, finally, the tides are like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I have never even heard of that sort of mini-tide. It’s weird.

I will enjoy visiting again.

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.

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.

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.

another addition to the zoo.

Today is the 6-year(!) anniversary of picking up the violin! I thought it was 7, but my teacher points out he forgets, on account of the, uh…I dunno. 30-35 years of making music before that? The trumpet was a loss because I had braces and a developing case of PTSD from school, but I learned to read music, and when I went to boarding school I took guitar lessons and started singing. I still play guitar a lot. I don’t know how much I’ve improved over the years, but it’s my mother instrument. Piano would have ultimately been more useful, though it would have required a special education teacher to help me make sense of piano scores.

(I have trouble distinguishing details in a bunch of identical straight lines, which makes music an adventure, and piano scores just make my brain shut down.)

I’m buying a Nice Violin™: a 5-string by a guy who has mastered his craft and loves experimenting. He’s been collaborating with a fiddler/luthier who knows 5-strings inside and out and has been coaching the maker on what the sound and playability should be. The maker takes that back to his shop and just does his thing to make it sound like that. This is his fourth 5-string, so "#4" for short.

(I visited him over the summer: we thought we’d combine that with visiting Honor’s cousin in the same town. The cousin said "Oh, yeah! He’s a couple doors down, I helped him move his fridge." It cut down some travel time.)

It turns out I saw this one "in the white" in his workshop, unvarnished; he didn’t have it strung up, so I didn’t play it, but I did get to hold it up alongside the Dahlia (the model name for my current violin I’ve played for three years now). I’ll take pictures, but it’s a little silly how different they are.

I’m keeping the Dahlia, because while it’s an uncommonly good factory-built violin from China, if I take it out to a bar or whatever and it goes missing, that will be sad,  but it is replaceable. As is the bow I (will continue to) use, which is carbon fiber. The Dahlia also has a really, really good piezoelectric pickup in it, which is a handy thing to have around. Also I like playing it and it looks cool.

#4 deserves a name, and to tell the truth, the Dahlia might also. We’ll see what #4 tells me, beyond "you have a lot of practicing to do."

self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…

Gaudete, gaudete!

One thing that Tim brought into our lives was the musician George Winston, who he saw in Maine at some point, and in particular Winston's solo piano albums.

(His other interest is slack-key Hawaiian songs, which don't speak to me at all, but made for an interesting show when I saw him play at the Troy City Music Hall. I was with the talented concert pianist I was dating at the time, and his technique has some obvious quirks that drove her nuts, which I of course exploited to needle her. ANYWAY.)

The album December probably has original compositions on it, I dunno, but my favorite track has always been the souped-up (instrumental) arrangement of "The Holly and the Ivy." I don't actually know the song from anywhere else, but in looking for a good video of it (check out this one!) I came upon the old Latin carol "Gaudete." As you'd expect, the King's Singers do a tight traditional madrigal thing.

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BUT. You can also hear it done by Steeleye Span, one of the stalwarts of the English folk revival! Their approach is much more of a "humans without conservatory training" vibe, just having at it with their daytime accents.

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It doesn't exactly feel secular, what with the "Christus est natus / Ex Maria virgine" refrain, but despite the Latin—which is not rocket science, as Latin goes—their performance is definitely vernacular. The dude in front is wearing a white t-shirt and seems to have mixed feelings about this song interrupting his glass of wine (which he continues holding). It's entirely likely they can make themselves sound like a regular choir, but that territory has been amply covered for centuries. Regardless, clearly Maddy Pryor has found an application of her voice that she's content with.

Steeleye Span is also my favorite version of "The Boar's Head Carol":

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We used to go to the huge Boar's Head Festival at the Neo-Gothic church where I went to nursery school, and it was amazing. If you grabbed some artists and said "Build me a medieval Christmas festival inside a church" you would get that sort of profusion of acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, people on stilts, acrobats on stilts, pageant, and music. Steeleye Span's "rehearse a lot and then get a couple drinks in before the show" approach really honors the material.

"The Boar's Head Carol" also connects with the text of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, of a similar vintage. It wasn't until an adulthood blessed with Wikipedia that I looked them up and learned that mixed-language texts are called "macaronic." Knowing this has had no apparent impact on my life, except that I know it, and learning is my most fundamental joy.

now with 18 strings!

I bought a guitar! Well, two. Taylor Guitars is having a holiday sale with a steep discount on their very well-done small guitars, the GS Minis, and I kind of wanted one anyway, so I allowed myself to be seduced. The GS Mini is a delightful "sounds good, fun to play, throw in the car, won't be heartbroken if it's stolen" instrument. The bigger guitar, an 814ce, is thoroughly delightful, and wildly different from my old one. I've never had more than one acoustic guitar at once, and now I have three, which is a real treat. I'll try to make some recordings, though I tried today and wasn't satisfied. (I mostly resent the intrusion of electricity into my hobbies, and I'm a perfectionist about my music, so recording is annoying and I don't get better at it.)

My guitar since 2003 has been a very faithful and anonymous 1970s Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-28, a shape Martin invented in 1916 and named after a battleship. Like many pre-amplification instruments, it's designed to stand up to loudmouths like violins or horns, and even in the modern age of microphones, the Dreadnought sound is what you hear in just about every bluegrass, country, and old-time tune, and a whole lot of folk and rock. Gibson, a venerable company with a very different vibe and level of design and quality control, also makes Dreadnoughts, which don't sound like Martin's.

I have a lot of affection for my pseudo-Martin, and we've spent a long time together, but the more I play the Taylor, the closer I get to moving the pseudo-Martin to its next home. That may mean just gifting it on to some kid with no money, because being that it's not actually a Martin, it's worth a fraction as much as  a Martin, no matter how good it is. It's what used guitar ads call a "player's instrument," which I guess is opposed to "collectible": if you only care about making music, sink a little money into this thing which will not appreciate over time, but will help you make music.

And, hey, if the not-Martin and my earlier Yamaha electric both leave the house, there's space for a 12-string, and a short-scale bass...

that could have gone better.

There's a phenomenal fiddle+guitar duo out of Boston, called Rakish, and when I saw they have a new album out, I thought I'd see where they're touring. They don't usually come to the West Coast, obviously, but lo and behold, they were at the Bellingham (WA) Celtic Festival, doing a show, and leading a "session," which is an Irish/Scottish thing where musicians gather, usually in a pub, and a leader starts playing a tune, everyone else joins in, they play it for a few minutes, then signals the transition to the next song.

"How can this possibly work?", you ask. For some reason nobody wants to say this out loud, but the way it works, I shit you not, is that the participants know hundreds and thousands of tunes. Musicians do the same for the American offshoots of Irish/Scottish, what are now things like Old-Time and bluegrass. I saw it happen when I was at Fiddle Tunes in 2019. It's really daunting, if you don't know the tunes or you're not able to make it up as you go along. Or, like me, it takes you the entire eight repetitions of the tune just to start remembering the melody.

Rakish were absolutely stunning in concert, everything I could have hoped. And everything else about the week was the worst travel I've had since being in Mexico with The Bad Relationship™ twenty years ago.

It's a long story, but mostly, the Airbnb I rented turned out to have had cats living in it for several weeks. It was a huge place, beautiful woodwork all over, with a million little places cats would just love: for example, the roll-out shelves where I put my clothes. I found out the cat thing after the first night.

(There is a pattern in my family tree of fathers who don't want cats in the house justifying it to the kids by falsely claiming to be allergic to cats. I however, am actually allergic to cats. Not anaphylactic-shock allergic, but it's easy to overwhelm anything an antihistamine can do for me.)

The hosts were super nice about it, and they worked with Airbnb to refund my remaining nights. It's definitely their fault—cats were mentioned briefly in the last line of the listing, and the house is so big it couldn't be de-catted in just the few hours used for cleaning. I moved myself to a hotel.

Unpacking my clothes at the hotel, my ears started to itch again, and I realized I was going to have to wash all my clothes. Bellingham turns out to have the best laundromat I've ever seen, but even so, it sucked up most of a day.

The hotel couldn't extend my stay to my last day, and it was just an ordinary hotel, so rather than fuck around with it, I reserved a different Airbnb for the last few days. I carefully asked the host about cats first. Success!

I went to a workshop about playing in sessions, which I was really hopeful about, because I want to play music with other humans. But it turned out to be a very very very chatty Irish-American, who just went on and on, talking about balancing the various interpersonal and musical dynamics of a group. That is (a) how I make a living, and (b) something I've been doing for 30 years, in theater and music before I was in tech.

On the bright side, there's a lawyer from L.A. who I'd originally talked to when I first wanted to buy a Mats Nordwall cittern, eons ago, and he's generally been down an expert version of my musical path, so it was surprising to discover he was staying on the floor above me. For his part, he and his girlfriend had no idea there was another unit in the basement there, so they had a different surprise.

And finally, one of my least restful vacations ever came to an end, and I got to go home, exhausted and dissatisfied. That didn't last long, since I got laid off a couple weeks after, and had a whole series of other things to think about.

keep on shippin' on.

My cittern has gotten as far as Stockholm, which is enough to get into the USPS tracking system!

I have spent the last week assuming "UTRIKES" is a place, but it actually just means "to/about a foreign country," which means that my cittern is probably on a ship on the ocean. Luckily, Evergreen shipping—of last year's Suez Canal blockage—has grounded a different ship—named, I shit you not, EVER FORWARD—outside of the Port of Baltimore, but courteously off to the side, on a shoal just over half the ship's draft, rather than blocking the channel.

I stopped by Gryphon Strings the other day, and exercising great discipline, I did not acquire a single new instrument. Martin Guitars, of which I own an admirably illegal Japanese copy from the 70s, does try a lot of new things, for a 190-year old company, and they created this weird thing that I wanted to try. It is delightful, and maybe that will make its way here. We're doing some rearranging and refurnishing the living room, which will involve changes in instrument storage/display. We're not out of wall space, as such, but it's definitely not a blank canvas.

INCOMING

Just over a year ago, I ordered an instrument from a maker in Sweden, who said he would start it in November, which he did. And now, a year later, as promised by his website, it's actually in the mail!

If you can believe it, this is just his standard model, even the mother-of-pearl inlay. When it comes to aesthetics in musical instruments, the answer is that, while you can most certainly overdo it, the most important thing is that it makes you want to pick it up and play it.

The only custom bit I ordered is the soundport there. I've really liked them when on guitars I've played in shops: it expands where the instrument is projecting, but more importantly it projects it to me, the player, so I can hear more like what an audience would hear. And I'm not performing, which means I'm always playing mostly or entirely for myself, so I should get to enjoy it fully.

It's called a "cittern," which I've written about before, and the fastest way to describe it is that it's

1. a big mandolin, 
2. the size of a regular guitar, 
3. with an extra pair of strings.

The particularly Swedish aspect is that in place of the heaviest metal strings, it uses classical guitar strings. This gives it a distinctive voice, and lowers the string tension, so the maker can build it more lightly. And, finally, this all lets the instrument resonate with a capo on, all the way up the neck. Fretted instruments like mandolins and guitars tend to feel sort of...pinched, or tight, if you try to capo past, say, the 7th fret. By all reports and observations, Swedish citterns just go ahead and keeping ringing out, more or less wherever you want to put the capo.

Anyway, that's exciting, since I've wanted one of these for half a decade now. Maybe Honor and I will sit down with my cittern and their gorgeous banjo and bring our full "this is not my primary instrument" energy. 😀

the zoo.

I just got another entry in my endless quest for a travel violin. I wouldn't take it gigging, but I'm always on the lookout for something lightweight and durable, easier to, yannow. Travel with. On airplanes particularly. One challenge is getting annoyed with an instrument that has less expressive range than I do; the ultimate answer to that is just to put up with the inconvenience and bring the real violin. It's not like it's a cello or a bass: it fits fine in the overhead compartment. Still, I dream.

The Cricket shows promise, though. Pretty much any violin made specifically for traveling–and there are not many–is based on the pochette, which dance teachers would carry around for accompanying their students. As that article shows, they sounded awful, as a rule, so people have put a little bit of modern knowledge and technology into making them nicer to play and to listen to. You can see this guy's travel and pochette fiddles, and the traveler models have eye-watering prices for something I'd expect to be tramping around with, or even just tossing into cars. (I think he just does them for fun, and for his day job he's a hydrologist or something.)

Magic Fluke is primarily a ukulele company, and this bears some signs of being built for fun by people who don't set up violins for a living, in particular a sharp corner at the top of the fingerboard, right where the hand will hit it every time. I also thought it was sounding quiet, so I repositioned the bridge closer to where it's supposed to be, which was a 10-15x volume increase; but I will bring it to an actual violin guy, who will make it sound its thin, reedy best, and can sand down that corner in a way that will not make it worse (he can even do it symmetrically on each side). I have an extra set of somewhat nicer violin strings, too, which will probably help.

(Solid-body electric violins sound more or less the same no matter the size, free of the heartless physics of sound waves in air; for the same reason, they're better able to sound good across a wider range of frequencies, so 5 or 6 strings require no fancy engineering adaptations. But, like electric guitars, their musical power without their extremely heavy support systems is pretty much zero.)

Here's my current list of instruments:

• Dahlia 5-string violin.
• Cricket Violin by Magic Fluke.
• Cecilio Sparkly Blue Electric Violin. (Marked for deaccession.)
• Fiddlerman Artist Viola.
• Unsatisfactory travel violin, built by a random guy on the Internet.  (Marked for deaccession.)

• 1970s patent-infringing Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-18 guitar.
• Blueridge tenor guitar (4 strings).
• Line 6 Variax Standard. (Electric guitar that emulates the sound of many other guitars.)

• Eastman MD505 mandolin.
• J. Bovier solid-body electric mandolin.
• Large octave mandolin/small Irish bouzouki, by Bigleaf Mandolins. (Marked for replacement.)

I ordered a weird Swedish thing from Sweden, but the guy won't start building it until November, so I really don't think it should count...

sometimes archaic technology is fine.

By default, the bowed strings use the same string attachment/adjustment design that every stringed instrument in human history used, until the Industrial Revolution: simple friction pegs, stuck in holes and turned as needed. I imagine this must have been quite an art before precision tools; now you can easily buy a reamer (for the holes) and a...peg...shaving...thing. It's like a pencil sharpener, but shapes the peg's barrel to match the shape the reamer makes in the hole.

Instruments like the guitar and bass quickly converged on geared tuners, because of their greater string tension, but the violin, viola, and cello have kept their friction pegs, on the grounds of being simple, functional, predictable, and lightweight, and being a safe baseline condition for these amazing instruments which can easily last hundreds of years with some care. Attempts at improvement have mostly failed for being too heavy––for the violin and viola, that weight falls at the end of your outstretched arm, like a see-saw, and the extra mass can sometimes inhibit vibration in undesirable ways––or requiring some kind of permanent alteration, like bigger holes, or gluing some kind of bushing into the hole. In the 1800s, you could do that (and more!) to your 300-year old Italian violin and probably no one would care; over time, violins, including almost every Stradivarius, had their neck extended to accommodate changing musical needs. 

(There is exactly one Strad in original condition, called the Messiah, and it lives a sheltered life in the Ashmolean Museum. It gets brought out every so often for virtuosi to play, because sufficiently powerful instruments, for lack of a better term, get crabby and temperamental when they're not played. I've played violins in their crabby state. My acoustic guitar probably qualifies, also.)

Of course, with modern technology, people set to work and designed things that look like regular friction pegs, but actually have complex gearing inside. They're non-invasive to install, and seem to just work. They're in use on at least one Stradivarius. I don't have them, because I'm not proud and I just have fine-tuners on the strings, because the orthodox use of tuning pegs hurts my hand, and heterodox use is just annoying.

ANYWAY.

I was thinking maybe it's time to change the strings, because I've been playing on them non-stop for about 9 months. I've never changed a violin string on a nice instrument before. Easy enough, I look for instructions.

The Internet reminded me that friction pegs do not do their work efficiently without a coating, because they have to do two opposite things:

1. Turn smoothly, with minimal friction, when pulled away from the pegbox.
2. Refuse to turn at all, using the friction between the peg and its holes, when pushed into the pegbox.

The homemade way to do this is with a coating of classroom chalk and a coating of soap (or maybe the other way around), but the most venerable option is W.E. Hill Peg Compound, which has this mind-bending list of ingredients:

• Graphite powder (lubricant)
• Petroleum Jelly (lubricant)
• China clay (sticky)
• Talc (lubricant and sometimes sticky)
• Red Iron Oxide (fancy name for rust: rough and granular)

That's...interesting. The instrument does need it, or at least mine does. I replaced the middle string first, then had to re-do it later, not just because it's the middle string and blocks access to other strings, but I only put the peg dope on one of the two contact surfaces (each peg has one for each wall of the pegbox) and it wouldn't stay remotely in tune.

The effort was worth it, since the violin is now singing and ringing the way it first was, which, I'd mostly forgotten, might be a bit much.

There are, of course, more difficult things to tune:

stupid instrument.

I enjoy complaining about the violin, partly because it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but the truth is I'm pretty good at it, which is not so incredible, once you start grading on a curve. It's the same way a native English speaker like me with 3 years of studying French under their belt will be much more capable than the same person would be after 3 years of studying any form of Chinese.

(Unless you're Anna, whose natural aptitude with languages exceeds my natural and rarely-mentioned aptitude with weapons.)

Any teacher loves a student who wants to learn and will put the effort into it, and my teacher is no exception. It turned out we have a lot of tastes in common, particularly fiddle traditions, up to and including Scandinavian music, which is not for everyone––even I much prefer playing it to listening to most of it.

(Recall that the difference between a violin and a fiddle is that no one minds if you spill beer on a fiddle.)

And Baroque music, so I can play through a small Vivaldi concerto, and I was a bit off in the weeds being determined to play this Bach keyboard invention, so now I can play through it, too:

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He does love a ton of standard violin repertoire that I don't, and I'll end up learning some of it anyway because that's what one does. I expect it will, again, be much more fun to play than to listen to.

Even though my 5-string covers the viola range, I've been eyeing violas for some time. Physics means my violin's 14" air chamber cannot produce the same sort of tone or volume as that of a viola. Apparently violas aren't acoustically perfect either, because if they were, they'd be too long to play.

(I've seen websites where builders complain about this, citing their own frustrations in arguing that 5-strings are pointless, which seems pretty obviously untrue. In particular, they vent about how the low G on a violin barely sounds okay, and the low C on a viola of any size is even less okay. It's worth noting that building a violin is not exactly easier than playing one, though I'm sure it's a quick transition once you've been building cabinets for a decade.)

Maybe we can blame Anders Hall, of Nordic Fiddlers Bloc and SVER, who makes folk viola look awesome. Anyway, I bought a starter viola––probably smaller than his, but who knows. (Violin sizes are standardized, if nonsensically named according to fractions having no relationship to any of the instrument's dimensions. Violas are categorized by body length, in half-inch increments.)

It arrives tomorrow! So we'll see.

eventful weeks.

I meant to take a photo of all the empty space on our lot: the garage looked nicer as a debris pile than it had as a garage, and yet it's even better now that it's all gone, and better still since our neighbors (who we're friends with) took down the shared fence. Even once we give them back the 8"-12" the old fence stole from their property, there's so much space to work with: not just the 19'x19' building, but the 6' wide Shed of Doom on the far side, and the metal-roofed, low-ceilinged, termite-ridden shade structure over the patio. There's so much space for things that are...not ugly! Someone on Nextdoor even wants the old well pump from 1955 or whenever.

In an improbable coincidence, the garage was demolished and then suddenly our permit to demolish+rebuild–which permit has been stalled for, no joke, 2 years–was approved. Not that any of us have the bandwidth for that, whether it's the project management, or the construction noise that we can't get away from because...there's nowhere to go. Instead, we'll put up a nicer shade structure, and a couple of sheds for secure bike and tool storage, and big gates across the driveway to screen everything from the street. It's gonna be awesome.

One thing startups don't like to tell young engineers is that any given startup, no matter how carefully they think they've chosen, is almost certainly not going to be the kind of success that will let them retire in luxury at 27. Silicon Valley relies on that heady brew of intelligence, optimism, ignorance, and heedless energy. Many of us keep working at startups even when we no longer have all of those things, because the money's good enough (depending on your lifestyle) and we don't like working at big companies. And there's a place for us, too. Or we hope so, as we get older.

This is not to say that companies don't find a way to "exit," as we say. The venture capitalists funding your startups are VCs because they're good at making money, for themselves and others. They know all the other VCs, who are also good at making money, and so it's not remarkably difficult for VCs to make money for each other–at the very least, to get their investment back–by buying each other's companies. If you own millions of shares, this can be a hefty down payment on your new Learjet; if you're an engineer who was employee #40, it will likely come out somewhere between "a weekend at the Four Seasons" and "buy a new Volvo." I've worked at a lot of startups–I think a dozen?–and all but the single most idiotic managed to fumble their way into a half-assed demise of being bought by Microsoft or Facebook or something. As a rule, VCs are good at getting paid.

I did manage to extract some real, non-hypothetical money from this last one, which means reserving money for taxes, paying off a lot of debt, and buying more musical instruments I've been eyeing for months or years. And probably adding to the list, since that is the way of things.

I've been mostly enjoying this round of job searching, which is new. I was a people-manager for 4 years at a name-brand company that everyone in tech recognizes, so I just have to talk fluently and convincingly about people and teams and organizations and relationships, which I can do easily, unlike programming interviews, which I can't. I'd already been unemployed for 3 months when the comically awful January struck, I'm pretty ready to stop looking and start working. I've been talking to so many companies, this week especially, that it's been hard to keep them straight, as I give similar answers to the same questions from different small companies on the same day. I'm happy to find places that value emotional intelligence (or would like to), and I'm expecting two or three offers to land next week, though, and then I can get busy hiring my Army of Dread Software Minions.

For my birthday I bought my first truly nice violin bow. It's carbon fiber, so far the only material to really compete with the incredibly problematic high-quality pernambuco wood that is still the musical standard. (Pernambuco is as messed up as any other tropical hardwood, and also it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something.) This one has a funky kind of design and balance, which they suggest is for "high-octane" performances, perhaps well-suited to unusual instruments like my 5-string violin.

I love it. But I don't really understand why. I've measured and weighed and checked the balance points among the 3 very different bows I have: the carbon fiber, a yellow sandalwood, and a "hybrid" which is wood over a carbon fiber core. The differences don't look so big on paper, but our human power of honing our perceptions make these things matter. There's a story of an Olympic-level fencing match, where one fencer stops and accuses his opponent of cheating via a longer weapon. Sure enough, Mr. Cheaterpants's weapon was...1/16" too long. I don't think this is exaggerated: in aikido, I adjust my timing by fractions of a blink, maybe 50-150 milliseconds objectively. Get the timing wrong and your technique won't work.

So the new bow bounces "right," and seems to draw the right sound out of the instrument, including the low C string. I dunno. I just like it.

campfire vs. concert hall.

So the Variax is tons of fun, because I can pick it up and be playing one of a couple dozen different instruments, to the detriment of the Vivaldi concerto I'm learning on the violin. I plugged it in for my violin teacher, and fingerpicked a little bit on the acoustic sounds, and he squinted a little bit––the relatively few musical elements I can play on the guitar, I'm pretty good at––and asked how long I've been playing guitar (since he just picked it up, and may feel a bit like how I feel on the violin).

This is an interesting question, partly because it will be 30 years next year, and because that number means so much, and so little. On the one hand, I've been playing for so long that I can't help but feel comfortable with it; on the other, I've never really put in the time and effort to become truly good at it, playing scales, applying more than the most basic (by my standards) music theory, or generally challenging myself overmuch.

Enjoying the instrument doesn't demand that of you. It's the quintessential "learn 3 chords and now you're all set for the next few decades of playing around campfires" instrument. Or take the same 3 chords and start a band that adds so much volume and distortion that it doesn't even matter if you tune the guitar first.

Or you can put your all into it, and be Django Reinhardt, who, no joke, was a groundbreaking guitarist with the 2 fingers remaining on his left hand.

Or Tommy Emmanuel, for Pete's sake, learning how to play everything by ear on the radio, not knowing anything about multiple instruments, or guitar capos, or thumbpicks:

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I don't have that kind of dedication, but if you pick up a guitar and play E-minor enough times, it sticks.

I'm selling myself a little short here, because I do know two fingerpicking patterns that I've added variations for. Maybe this is the year I crack open that book and add a third. And I have a bunch of ebooks about playing blues, which I glance at periodically. Mostly I'm just fucking around?

The ugly truth is far worse: I'm actually a very good musician.

Ugh.

how did I get here?

 (From the Talking Heads song, which I cannot recommend highly enough.)

If you remember from a previous adventure, there's a device, usually a pedal switch on the floor, called a "looper," where you start it, play a phrase of music, and then it just plays that phrase over and over. Then you can play more phrases on top of that ("overdubbing") and create textured layers of sound, even if there's only one of you, like this guy:

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Loopers, like their sibling effects "Echo" and "Delay," started out as an actual loop of magnetic tape, and while they're all solid-state now, they've mostly kept the same user interface (UI) as the original tape loopers, because...I don't know why. A bizarre skeumorphism, maybe. And I hate it! You have to tap your foot exactly right, and sometimes you need a double-tap, and the number of taps and the LED light indicators are all mode-dependent, and it's horrible. There's no need to suffer like this: we have computers! I was resigned to getting a MIDI floor switch and figuring it all out myself, but then it turns out a few other, more motivated people have had the same opinion, and did all that work already.

The switch I ordered comes with programming to make it JFW (Just F*cking Work) with a venerable and fabulous music-making program called Ableton Live, and since the looper is backordered, I've been spending some time learning Ableton, and the tools and history of electronic/computer-driven music.

This is interesting because I've listened to a lot of electronic music over the years, and the first thing to really strike me is that the essence of electronica, long songs composed of patterns repeated with small changes applied gradually, is really a function of the hardware available in the 70s and early 80s. Synthesizers that couldn't yet sound like real instruments, and sequencers with very little memory that repeated patterns (necessarily short) on the synthesizers. I think that relatively few people had a sound in their head and invented equipment to produce it; instead, they met the equipment and thought, "What can I make with this?".

The challenge that I'm seeing now: how do you use these tools to make music that doesn't sound like all the electronically-driven music I've already heard?

It's a digression, in a way, since this started by wanting to loop violin and guitar parts, but Ableton Live was written by German artist-engineers as a performance tool (hence the "Live"), and in its UI and terminology, it actually treats ordinary studio recording as a special form of performance (which it is). But I'll need to know the app to get the most out of it, in any case.

Every so often I look up and realize the kind of rabbit-hole I'm in, and it's all because I hate the restrictions of a single type of musical hardware, that most non-guitarists wouldn't recognize anyway.

improbable events.

What are the odds, really?

1.

I ordered a looper pedal to use with my violin, an electronic device that records a segment of your playing, then repeats it in a loop (hence the name). They're typically operated by a footswitch (since you're usually using your hands to play) and they come in levels of complexity, from basic ones with no indicators and a single footswitch, to monsters a couple feet wide with four or five switches. Some will play your phrase at half speed, or reversed, or whatever. I did some research and ordered one at about 75% of maximum complication, figuring I won't use a lot of it, but it has some features that would make my life simpler.

It arrived yesterday, a day early! But DOA. It's brand new! So I had a very expensive paperweight, while we do the replacement shuffle. I may have rage-ordered a much simpler one-switch model in the meantime. Will I like either one? Not sure.

This is Zoë Keating, a cellist who started here in the Bay Area, and popularized the idea of looping performance, especially on a classical instrument. At 6:07 they show the MIDI footswitch panel she uses to manipulate looping software on her laptop. This is the level of complication I was hoping to avoid by using a dedicated looper pedal.

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But for all that, if I try looping for anything more than amusement or practice, I may well end up writing code.

2.

I got a bizarre thing in the mail: a deposit confirmation from the investment firm Charles Schwab, for a considerable sum of money, attached to 1099-R forms for my 2020 tax return. The only note says "benefit lump sum." I've never seen a 1099-R before, and the Internet tells me it's a "retirement distribution," which is all well and good except that I checked on all my retirement stuff that I know about, and none of it has changed. Also I don't have a Charles Schwab account––or maybe I do, now!

This is unsettling because, while I won't claim to be on top of my finances, this is not the kind of thing I usually forget about. And while receiving money is great, there's usually a tax on that money, which is hard to pay accurately if you don't know what the money is.

3.

It's been viciously hot here, so we've been running air conditioners. Naturally, we figured we don't want to trip our circuit breakers––which would require an excursion into said vicious heat––and 2/3 of the house (built in 1938) runs on a single 20 amp circuit. So I busted out the circuit map, but then realized I had no idea how much power the A/C units used, and obviously it's a lot. Easy enough, I have a gadget for measuring a device's power usage. I started with the window unit in our bedroom, running on the Eco-Cool setting...about 75 watts. Ooookay...how about full blast...85 watts.

What?

How about the rolling unit in the office?

45 watts.

I'm expecting a power draw more like our microwave's 1500 watts. I looked at the manuals. The window unit mentions "4 watts" and "4400 watts," neither of which makes a ton of sense: a 20A circuit at 110V can only handle 2200 watts.

(Circuit breakers and fuses are measured in amps, but because the voltage is constant-ish, we usually take a shortcut and just talk about watts.)

20A is a normal household circuit breaker, so no one's going to sell a window A/C that uses twice that. And we already know empirically that the A/Cs don't trip the breakers when not run on the same circuit.

The other A/C unit's manual doesn't mention its power draw at all. I measure the usage again. I check the manual for the meter to make sure I'm not measuring in kilowatts by accident. I check against a 38W incandescent light bulb lingering in a floor lamp: the meter says 35W. Pretty solid, definitely not the orders of magnitude error I was expecting.

So apparently conservation technology has brought us to the point where I can run 3 air conditioners for at most 245 watts, which is 2-4 of the incandescent light bulbs we all used 15 years ago? My co-workers don't believe it either. But this is what data is for: because our intuitions are so often wrong.

fortuitous!

I got a violin I love just in time to learn how to shift my left hand up and down the violin. These are called "positions," and they're numbered, 1st through whatever (7th or 8th, I think, not used by normal humans). You might think, looking at the unmarked black expanse of the violin fingerboard, that finding a note is a pain in the ass, and you are 100% correct! This is why I have spent 2 years and 11 months learning to play in tune (with considerable if not universal success) via ear training and muscle memory, and now I get to learn to play in tune again. It's nowhere near as bad as I would have thought, though, because shifting to higher positions builds on the muscle memory of 1st position. (In 3rd position, your index finger goes where your ring finger was when you were in 1st position.)

I've also been drifting away from the Suzuki book, learning fiddle tunes instead, but the way to be able to tackle any fiddle tune is to play music harder than fiddle tunes, so I've been learning some Baroque stuff instead. Exhibit A is this Vivaldi concerto, starting with the third movement:

I like Yitzhak Perlman's version, partly because I have happy memories of seeing him on Sesame Street when I was a kid, but mostly because he plays it slower than the other versions I found.

The reason I'm glad to be learning this on a violin I love is that the notes are really high, and trying to play this stuff really separates out how good the instrument sounds and how well it's set up, and if I tried to do this on that stupid rental I happily returned last week, I would probably go nuts.

(Among other things, I always had this one problem where playing the pitch of the E string on the A string just sounded terrible no matter what I did. Probably in the future I could take that violin and make it sound good, but for learning now, it was just pissing me off. In the meantime, now I know what to check for when evaluating a violin for myself.)

So the fiddle is still marvelous. Since I can record it easily, I've started playing around with recording stuff, specifically multi-tracking some duets. Let me tell you, I have never encountered anything that exposes flaws in my playing like trying to accompany myself. It turns out that feeling like you're playing in tune, or even playing in tune with the previous phrase, is not that same as actually playing in tune the entire time. What a stupid fucking instrument.

Back later, I gotta go practice.