Playing my strumstick

I have this awesome little instrument called a Strumstick. It's basically a mountain dulcimer oriented like a slender little guitar. I used to have a mountain dulcimer but when I started playing music with the Glendessary Jam, I could not hear myself play my dulcimer and couldn't tell if I was playing the right notes. I got discouraged and gave my dulcimer away. I started playing a mandolin instead. Eventually I started playing a fiddle because I took a class and my teacher played at the Jam and I didn't want to disappoint her so I kept playing the fiddle. I kind of grew to enjoy the fiddle even though I'm worse than terrible at it.

I've tried a lot of musical instruments and as a result, I have a large inventory of different instruments lying around the house. I have simple-system flutes and pennywhistles, a mandolin, a violin, and a strumstick. I have a silver band flute, too, but it doesn't work. I play all my instruments except the silver flute. I'm not particularly good or talented but I do enjoy it.

When I first got the strumstick I had a hard time figuring out how to play it. The maker of the instrument claims it is easy to play, no wrong notes. Well, to me some of the notes do sound wrong. And it is very difficult to slide your finger up and down the high string quickly enough to get a good tune out at a decent dancing speed. Most of all, no instrument is easy if you don't have tunes in your head that you can actually play. I set my strumstick aside for quite a while as I focused on my fiddle at the Glendessary Jam.

Over the course of a year and a half of playing at the Jam, I've picked up a lot of tunes. They are memorized in my head. I have never looked at the sheet music to play them. I just go to the Jam and listen as they play a tune and pick up as many of the notes as I can. Eventually I learned quite a few tunes this way.

The other day I picked up my strumstick and realized that the first two strings are tuned just like my fiddle. D and A. The last string is tuned to D instead of E. It's so close to the fiddle that I just started picking out tunes. Instead of only playing melody on the high string, I played melody on all three strings just like on a fiddle. Wow! It worked and suddenly it really did have no wrong notes. The Old-Time tunes we play at the jam work perfectly for the strumstick. The chords and the melodies just seem to match. When I'm on the D strings the A string harmonizes well most of the time. When I'm on the A string, the D strings seem to harmonize well most of the time. Once in a while they don't quite harmonize right, but it's not exactly wrong, either. It has more of a simple, old-fashioned sound.

It's so much fun to play tunes on my strumstick. It's like having a little band in a box. I can play a melody and have chords going as a self-accompaniment at the same time. It makes me sound like I'm a real musician and know what I'm doing.I brought it to the Jam last weekend and had a blast strumming out the tunes. With a capo I can even play tunes in G and I suppose by retuning I could play in A, but I haven't tried that yet.

I've been thinking I would like to take my strumstick backpacking. I have the largest strumstick that McNally makes. Their smallest would be better because the large one is probably longer than a yard and could be difficult to pack and bump into low branches. I met a PCT hiker named Chief Daddy who had the smallest one. It was very tiny, packed well and had a nice tone like a mandolin. Mine has a deep tone more like a banjo, but with the capo I can get a brighter, higher tone similar to his.

Flute and running

Flute
My new flute in the key of E arrived. It's very nice. It's made of PVC plumbing pipe, which should make it look cheap and silly, but actually it comes out very nice and clean. It has a nice tone and the key of E has a nice feeling to it. It is made by Doug Tipple.

My plan is, since simple system flutes (flutes with just 6 holes and no keys like silver band flutes) play only two scales easily, is to use my E flute to play tunes in the key of A. On my regular Irish flute, the key of A requires one note to be played half-hole, covering only half the hole to make a G#. I find this to be easy enough on some tunes, but really hard on others. We play a lot of Scottish and Cape Breton tunes at my session, so I sit out a lot of A tunes. My E flute will play key of E and key of A easily. It's my new cheater flute so maybe I can play along with some of those tunes. The first one I'm learning is Frank's reel.

Running
I went running a few times this week. Today I went for a run without shoes. It feels good to run barefoot. It's easier than running in shoes.

I run in a nice neighborhood in the hills above my house. The pavement is very clean up there and there aren't too many people driving by in cars to intimidate me bouncing all my blubber around.

You might think it's a lot more damaging to run without shoes, but actually it feels less impactful. Running barefoot is sort of a fad right now, or a movement, depending on your point of view. There have been lots of articles in the news and there are many web sites and blogs on the topic. One I've enjoyed is Barefoot Ted's site. He doesn't write often, but his site can lead you to others if you're interested in reading more.

My years of hiking have demonstrated to me vividly—with blisters, stress fractures and other skeletal problems—the damage that shoes can cause. My solution for hiking has been to wear my shoes 2 or even 3 sizes too big, get the widest I can find (4E is ideal) and wear them with the laces as loose as possible. I choose shoes without motion control and with as little to hinder the natural movement of my feet as possible. I've had better luck the more I've moved in this direction.

The result of all these years of walking has been to see my toes straighten out and separate. Only my littlest toes still bend a little inward. I get less blisters wearing big shoes. My ankles have always been strong like tree trunks so I've never felt a need for ankle support. In fact, the first time I went with low-top hiking shoes I was so amazed at the freedom to use the full range of motion of my legs to help me get up hills that I never went back to the restriction of high-top boots again.

Anyway, since I've become quite blubbery in the past few months of being home from the PCT, running is my new hope to get the weight off.

Seed Exchange jam session

I played my fiddle with the Glendessary jammers today at the Seed Exchange. We were lucky there were sunny skies. It has been raining every day like cats and dogs all this week and the rain is supposed to return tomorrow. There's even a layer of snow on the tops of our mountains. This is not a usual occurrence. You can bet there are people up there building snow mans and little kids seeing the snow for the first time in their lives.

The Seed Exchange is one of those events that gives me hope for humanity. People were there just giving away seeds and gardening advice. Nothing real elaborate.

The reason the Seed Exchange gives me hope for humanity is because it's the exact opposite of what I learned about watching the movie Future of Food (or see their web site here.) There is true evil in the world and it's well described by this movie. Sometimes I go back and forth between whether I want any hope for humanity or whether it would be best to allow the evil described in that film to win. Maybe humanity isn't worth saving. Anyway, hope does feel good and things like making your own home-grown music and home-grown food provide big doses of it.

At the seed exchange I picked up some scarlet runner beans and pole beans seeds and some kind of herb I already forgot the name of. My little garden is too small to get greedy about free seeds. Lots of lettuce is growing. I made a nice salad the other night. Not sure where the beans are going to fit. Maybe in some pots.

After the playing the music, I walked down to the music shop to get new rosin for my bow and a new chin rest for my fiddle.

On the way home, I decided I would walk home in my bare feet, a distance of about a mile and a half. Some kind of street tree has dropped all kinds of sticky berries all over the sidewalks. It was difficult to walk with them stuck to my feet, forming a crust of sticky seeds all around the edges of my feet. It was kind of awful, but once I got that stuff on my feet, I didn't want to put my shoes back on.

Speaking of music, I decided to order a plastic PVC flute from Doug Tipple in the key of E. I placed my order this afternoon. With an E flute I will be able to play A tunes using G fingering. They sometimes play A tunes at the Irish session and I can almost pick them up on the fly, but that darn G# always messes me up. An E flute will make that easier. Or if not, at least it'll make for a nice camping flute.

They had a reed E flute made in India at the music shop where I got the rosin for only $16. It sounded really nice. It seems each key has it's own feeling, and E sounds rich and lovely. I suppose I could have gotten the reed flute instead. But it might not have been in tune. Doug's flutes may be made of simple materials, but they are of excellent quality and are in tune. They sound great too.

I'm learning the fiddle once again

Speaking of canceled Adult Education classes, they canceled my fiddle class. I only attended the class to learn tunes, not necessarily the fiddle. The fiddle was just along for the ride. But taking the class got me mildly interested in the fiddle again.

Somewhere I had a book I bought along with the fiddle. I think I've had the book and fiddle for about 14 years. I went through a phase right after I bought it where I really wanted to learn so I practiced my arm off. I never really got anywhere with it. So I put it away until I got interested in Irish traditional music. I made an attempt to learn the fiddle again, but once I realized you could play the flute in the Irish music tradition, I decided to play the flute instead.

While playing the Irish flute, I met musicians in town who invited me to come to the Glendessary Jam where they play American Old-time music. Unfortunately, the flute doesn't fit in, so I traded one of my flutes for a mandolin and have been playing the mandolin at the jam session. I took the fiddle class just so that I could hear some of the tunes we play at the jam slow enough to pick up all the notes.

The fiddle class helped me get interested in the fiddle again and helped me learn to play the instrument. Attending the Glendessary Jam has helped a lot with the fiddle, too, even though I've been plucking a mandolin. Sometimes just being around music and having it running through your head enables learning. Many aural traditions of music insist that you listen first, anyway.

So, recently I found my old fiddle book and it really has helped me with bowing, more than my class had. All it took was a tiny little demonstration in the book and now I think I'm actually catching on. It's almost sounding like music, although my intonation leaves much to be desired. I'm working on that too. I'm actually having a lot of fun. Maybe I will be a fiddler after all.

Life is so much more fun when you are learning. We should all have time to follow our interests and fill our lives with new skills.

Musician for hire, no talent, will work for tri-tip

I take a mandolin to the Glendessary Jam in the park once a week. There I play along to tunes I do not know on an instrument I do not know how to play. By the time they've played the tune through a few times I've got a basic skeleton of the tune and can fake my way through well enough. When I can't fake my way, I just play the bass note of whatever chord they are playing, unless I'm clever enough to play the actual chord, which isn't often since I only know 3 chords. How do I even know what chord they are playing? I don't. I just guess by listening. If I make a noise that matches, it must be right.

Tonight, thanks to being on the email list and having some friends now at the jam, I was encouraged to attend a gig where we would be providing the evening's musical entertainment in exchange for a tri-tip barbecue dinner and wine. That makes it my first paying gig.

So, with no experience and no skills I managed to become a musician. Pretty amazing achievement, I think.

The trick to having an adventurous life is trying things you think you will enjoy even if you don't know how to do them.

Swinging on a Gate

I started a tune last night: Swinging on a Gate.

I had been practicing it all week. And then, like a miracle, I heard someone mention that tune during the evening. I knew they were wanting to play it. It was going to be my lucky night.

So, at some point there was a lull. There were a lot of lulls during the night, but during this particular one it occurred to me that now was the time to start the tune.

And they played along. One fellow even rushed to get his guitar out but was too slow so we played another round. It was hard to start the tune with a guitar backer already going, but I managed.

Overall it was a fun night. I seem to be getting better at picking up tunes I don't even know. Or maybe they just had some that were easy to pick up. And as usual, many of the ones I've been working on were impossible to play. But at least I did relatively OK with my dumbed-down version of Dinky's reel.

Anyway, back to another 2 or 3 weeks of practicing until the next session.

Fluting in the park

Today was a lovely day so I walked to the park for lunch like I always do. I sat under a tree and practiced my flute. There were a lot more people out than usual. I try to ignore them otherwise I get flummoxed and make too many mistakes. I forgot my sunglasses so I closed my eyes.

I could hear people going by on the bike path a few times. Once I detected someone going very slowly. When I opened my eyes it was an old man and a younger man walking. Fortunately they weren't staring at me.

On my way back to the office I saw the old man on his return trip on the bike path and he mentioned hearing me play my flute. I was embarrassed, but at least he liked it. It's nice that people hear so little live music and even less live flute music that they think I'm any good. Of course he could have just been polite.

The session is tomorrow. I always look forward to it, but I end up not playing as much during the session as I would at home. I will bring my big boxwood flute, but lately I feel that my Folk Flute is playing better. It's got such a lovely bottom end.

Every new tune is like a new trail to explore

I'm learning to play the Irish flute. Unlike my reputation as a hiker, I'm not very good at it. The Irish flute is not easy to play. I'm not very fast or skilled at it. I don't have a very good tone yet. I can barely play most tunes.

But I love it anyway. It makes me happy. I could play all day long and sometimes I do when I can't think of something else to do.

There are so many tunes to learn in the Irish Traditional Music genre. And each one is like finding a new trail to explore.

I can explore a new tune and then share it with others, just like I do with new trails I find. I love the way people's excitement stirs when they learn a new trail. It's the same when they learn a new tune, even when someone as inexperienced and unskilled as I am is the one to show it to them.

Why the flute? I think the flute is the prettiest-sounding instrument. An Irish flute is not the silver kind you play in an orchestra. It is made of wood and sometimes has silver keys on some of the holes, but the main holes never have keys, and some flutes, like mine, have no keys at all. It plays only a major D or G scale if you cross-finger the C-natural. If you need other notes outside these two scales, you have to half-hole or cross-finger. They are not built in.

It would seem this is a limitation, making the instrument frustrating, but it is not. Irish music is usually written in these two key signatures, employing what are called modes, which means that there are minor scales and other hauntingly beautiful scales that fit inside the D and G key signatures. There's more than enough variety and complexity and excitement in these tunes to fit into a lifetime. Having only six holes to open and close is not limiting at all.

People on online Irish music forums sometimes get mad at me because I have the gall to attend Irish sessions as a beginner to the music and to the instrument. But I have been welcomed and told to keep coming back so I do.

Sometimes people get mad at me on online forums because I read sheet music instead of doing all my learning by ear. The people at my session also read sheet music. Only the ones who have been playing forever are capable of picking up new tunes by ear after hearing them only one or two times. Some of the others at the session can pick up a new tune after maybe 10 times. The rest of us use a combination of sheet music and ear-learning. There are even a few tunes I've found myself playing at the session that I don't know, having picked it up by ear.

The whole experience, from hearing the music, to selecting and purchasing the flute, to learning to play, to learning the tunes, to struggling with my embouchure, to meeting new people is another experience that adds to my personal wealth. Studies have shown that the pursuit of money and posessions do not bring happiness. It is the memory of experiences had and the mastery of skills that bring happiness.

Are you following a trail to happiness?