Banjos & Such @mayor@banjo.town

You know what? This tintype of my dork-ass self is cool as hell

Here is 'Firefly Jig' by Herbert J. Ellis, , circa 1900, played on a Bay State #banjo made in 1896. #fediversemusic #musiciansofmastodon

Back on my Cole's Eclipse 3000 obsession bullshit again

Meh, sync is off by a couple of frames (probably because I split the audio out to tweak it and then brought it back in?) and this is not a proper audio mix, but I'll try again later.

In honor of the fireflies being out this week, here is "Firefly Jig" by Herbert J. Ellis , written circa 1900.

ai-generated art

…but, holy smokes is it fun to play with for track art ideas

… If you get too specific it winds up recreating iconic artwork for you, though

Dall-E excels at prompts “in the style of [artist]”, especially if said artist has a subject matter they did a lot of, vis “Art Deco cityscape at night in the style of Joseph Stella”

Some theremin noise nonsense, mostly experimenting with a formant filter (and glitching an old educational film with ffmpeg)

I went looking for plans for building a guitar rack and found this one and every time I look at photos of peoples' builds it gives me such agita, why would you design this with a 90º angle

whoa #discodiffusion

Really pretty good at capturing a vibe. "Poster" leads to some interesting stuff because it pulls in incoherent typographic elements #discodiffusion

Fooling around with DiscoDiffusion as a lazy way to generate track artwork and it is pretty wild how well it nails Henri de Toulouse Lautrec stylistically

This is an arrangement of a quadrille called "Jim Brown" from Elias Howe's 1851 "banjo preceptor" instruction book. #banjo #fretless #fediversemusic

What a pleasant tune. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqq8jJr5ncQ #banjo #standardnotation

The #banjototw over on instagram is "Gal with the Blue Dress On," which seems to be one of those names that is used for different tunes geographically, none of which sound all that similar to the song by that name in Briggs' Banjo instructor (1855) which I'm finally getting around to learning

welp

Frank Converse wrote a few #banjo pieces in non-standard keys; because of the drone string, most of the music written for the older gCGBD tuning is in the key of C or G (A or E eAEG#B in the mid-19th century when banjos were tuned lower)

The shapes always feel all wrong, muscle memory is a hell of a thing

...something like this is what I had in mind when I bought the thing. I should be smaller in the frame to convey a better sense of stage+backdrop but it's encouraging. Ought to look pretty good if I use my LED strip footlight!

All processing done in ffmpeg; chromakey composite over the background with a LUT to simulate orthochromatic film, and some simple alpha noise for "grain" (although that's somewhat lost in the conversion to GIF)

I *finally* spent some time screwing around with the pop-up green screen I impulse purchased early last year. I need to experiment more but it seems like 5x7 is *barely* large enough to sit a few feet in front of with an instrument.

On the plus side, pretty good results with nothing but my living room’s existing overhead lighting.

It remains to be seen if I can come up with anything other than a black background that doesn’t look cheesy