Who Runs Banjotown? @mayor@banjo.town

Well, as lousy as the streaming model is for artists I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t neat to see my music in the iTunes store. About 24 hours after submitting it to #distrokid, not bad. From what they say, other services will probably take 1-2 weeks plus. #FediverseMusic

Album uploaded to #distrokid, so in theory it will be available most places online (except Spotify) within a week or so.

My expectations are low and I'm vaguely distrustful of the vast distribution machinery, but it's a pretty affordable year-long experiment.

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In what world is this cool, useful, or profitable to me? I guess if someone uses your music Instagram sticks a little badge in the corner, but being instagram you know damn well they're not going to make it a link somebody can follow to actually buy music from me

Alright! Ready to mash that publish button at midnight.

(I am almost certainly going to fuss more with the cover image between now and then, and I would love to put together an honest to goodness PDF "booklet" but I do need to do actual work today)

#bandcampfriday

I'm bona fide again! #americanbanjofraternity #secretsociety #cardcarrying #banjo

Ok, I had gotten this off the old phone years ago, but browsing the camera roll reminded me of it

Ok, I know I spend a lot of time complaining about how unusably huge smartphones have gotten but I cannot believe how tiny the 4S was, it makes me claustrophobic

A friend who has no idea I’ve been thinking about pianos just emailed straight out of the blue and said “hey do you want a free piano” 👀

I said no. I still don’t have anywhere to put one nor the budget to have it properly moved to tuned

#tbt, "Briggs' Breakdown" from from Briggs Banjo Instructor (1855) I recorded a few years back. Audio boosted, pretty noisy #banjo #mastomusic #music #19thcentury #musiciansofmastodon

Getting reacquainted with this instrument that I set aside for a while for various reasons (pardon the messy strings, a couple of the pegs slipped and unwound at one point, which was partly why I set it aside) #peghead #pighead #banjo

#onthisday three years ago, I scored my #theremin via Craigslist... the culmination of literally 5-6 years of patient IFTTT monitoring.

I really need to give it more love.

Remembering the chronology of this project a little better now that I'm thinking of it, and I'm a little dismayed to realize it was actually *eight* years ago I started fooling around with it.

Most of my motivation at the time was wanting a "real" minstrel #banjo (tension hoop and adjustable brackets vs tackhead, the only functional difference being the ability to tighten the head when it sags in humid weather) which I did not own at the time.

Not long after abandoning my own efforts I did acquire such a banjo through other means, and so my itch was scratched for a good long while; a few years later I began focusing on slightly newer music, played on more modern, fretted instruments, so it's just been hibernating, mostly out of sight out of mind.

I certainly don't *need* another banjo but I've been bitten by my older fascination of making objects that make music, and as I mentioned the other day, Boucher's banjos were beautiful objects in and of themselves, I'd love to have a clone hanging on the wall even if I don't wind up playing it much.

Spent a few hours today reclaiming our very cluttered, very cramped basement, which is the closest thing I have to a workshop.

This is the cleanest this bench has been in at least a year, and I made inroads on other parts of the room that have had junk piling up in them; basements are like that.

Six years ago or so I got a bee in my bonnet to try and make a Boucher style banjo from stem to stern; I bought a nice solid chunk of maple, made a form for bending, rigged up a steam box, etc. never quite got a rim actually made, and never got any further on the neck than this; lacking a table saw and an angle-cutting jig, I got discouraged trying to use my too-small, underpowered bandsaw and set it aside.

Right now I’m kind of like, “screw it, I’ll do this with hand tools, it’s good enough for George Wunderlich.” It also occurred to me that there are probably quite a few #lutherie videos on YouTube now; the last time I made a sustained effort at making a banjo neck was around 2006, and there was precious little out there then.

As for the rim, to hell with it; I’ll buy one.

(I have no idea if I’m actually going to resume work on this any time soon, but it’s nice to actually want to for the first time in a long time)

Oh wow, the #glitchsoc audio widget is really nice. Would love to see that get ported upstream to #mastodon. #mastodev

Cleaned up the C minor transcription I made last fall and added a tab staff because why not? (Whoops, that C chord in measure 12 should be a C minor) #notation #sheetmusic #banjo #tablature #lilypond

Whenever I start fooling around with plectrum or tenor banjo I very quickly get into wheel-spinning mode because I have basically zero experience playing jazz, don't know the repertoire, don't really have an external stimulus to learn (and retain) repertoire.

But I'm thinking maybe it's time to attempt an active study of McNeil's Chord System.

Sneak preview of a track I'll be releasing to Bandcamp tomorrow! It's a #banjo funeral march from #1865, played on a fretted banjo in concert pitch with #mellotron accompaniment. #magicianssociety #mastomusic #music #oddio #earlybanjo #musicians #recording

I would dearly love to know who made this image, and find a high quality print of it

This morning in digital archaeology: Managed to retrieve the stems of a song I recorded on this busted-ass iPhone 6 four years ago. I think I had originally shared them to dropbox but then moved them elsewhere, and who knows what I did with them then. Possibly in some other cold storage, possibly not.

It's a little terrifying to contemplate 1) how much digital content we all generate and 2) how easy it is for it to just slip away despite all the interconnectivity in the world.