The Hon. Mayor of Banjotown @mayor@banjo.town

Idly wondering this morning what the heck the model of my old Fender amp was; I traded my smaller amp in college with someone who was looking to downsize. It was a SS, fairly small amp... couldn't have been more than 20-25w. Nothing fancy.

Sold it at a "about to move cross country" yard sale and I'm still a little bit salty about the russian woman who bullied my spouse into selling it for $7 when I was talking to someone else

Not sure where I first encountered the "don't ever touch your truss rod, ever ever ever, you'll snap your neck, in fact, to be on the safe side don't even look at your truss rod cover" school of thought, but I guess it was early and forceful enough that, before watching a bunch of YouTube videos, I never would dared.

...and there are definitely people online who take it to the other extreme, like, their first suggestion to anyone's guitar problem is to start whaling away at the truss rod and that doesn't seem prudent either.

But, the more I played my new-to-me Epiphone, I realized I was getting some fret buzz. When I did the 'capo on the first fret, finger on the 22nd fret' test there was *no* clearance at all in the middle of the fingerboard, so I decided to have a go.

Loosen strings, quarter turn, retune, re-check the neck relief, repeat.

A total of 1/2 turn counter-clockwise made a substantial difference. Going to let it settle for a day or two and see where it's at. Pretty gratifying and emboldening!

Just got word that the banjo I used to record the 'Old Days' EP, --my first, bought 19 years ago-- has sold on consignment, and being the sentimental sap that I am I shouldn't be surprised by how sad I am at the news.

As an instrument, I will not miss it at all; I hardly played it for 18 1/2 of those 19 years and it had been knocking around in its gig bag that whole time. The whole point of the EP was to give it a last hurrah before moving it along.

It's mostly the "familiar object that's been with me for a very long time and now some total stranger has it" aspect of it, and that will fade quickly enough.

Ignoring inflation, I also got about what I paid for it out of the sale, so that's kind of a nice equilibrium. And it's motivation to try moving a couple of other things along.

how to avoid becoming a blues dad

@dustin BRB pitching a MIDI kazoo to the Kazoobie people

A week or so ago some kid on reddit made a post that was basically like "people who learned how to play guitar in the 80s and 90s, how did you even do it? Were there, like, conservatorial professors and books?" and I keep thinking about it and turning to dust

I think I may have just decided to part with my (Squier) strat. I was trying to learn a riff on the 7th fret, got frustrated, tried it on the new Epiphone and it was, like, a lot easier to play.

The strat's action is a little bit high and that's fixable, but it's also a matter of neck width (narrow) and maybe also depth (too deep). 🤔

So, yeah, I've been guitarposting over on my @thermous alt lately out of some lingering sense of needing to live up to the "but I'm an obscure banjo guy" online identity I've established over the last 10 years (such as it is. It's a drop in the bucket as far as online presences go) but it feels a bit silly, *especially* on the fediverse where I am (as far as I know) the only early banjo enthusiast.

I've set plectrum banjo aside for the moment because I'm rediscovering guitar. Like, regular old rock guitar, which was my first musical love. The cheap Kmise tenor that I bought last month kicked something loose in my middle-aged brain and I decided I'm tired of the "musically lonely and frustrated because I can't find anyone to play with because I'm out here in the woods stubbornly playing shit nobody plays" hamster wheel.

Cashed in some rewards points for a no-frills little practice amp (I can't overstate how nice it is to have an analog amp that is just overdrive, gain, and tone and not a million amp models and effects built-in,) and splurged a bit on a new-to-me guitar. (I was going to wait until I got vaccinated and spend a day guitar shopping, but when I found a local-ish listing for a used Epiphone Dot in the rare color I'd gotten a bit obsessed with, I decided to jump on it.)

Spending some time getting back in the saddle before taking some lessons to recalibrate and pick up where I left off ~25 years ago.

Fingers hurt from those steel strings, but in a good kind of way. Feels like waking up.

...TIL that DGBE on #plectrumbanjo feels and sounds very strange in the same way that a folk/country song played on a six-string banjo always sounds a little bit off to me; You get the plunky sound but my brain objects to the chord voicings because it's used to hearing them in C or open G tuning.

TFW writing your first rock-type song in many many years and feeling increasingly positive that you're just rewriting someone else's song that's burrowed deep in your subconscious

@shapr my best guess is that "warm" is a polite rephrasing of "sweaty", and they're claiming that their strings are impervious to that?

Old packaging/advertising claims are so great

#notaffectedbywarmhands

I just stumbled across this lovely collection of vintage string envelopes (most of which are for sale, although the page hasn't been updated in a while)

Love ephemera like this. IIRC there's an article about/by a collector in an early issue of the Fretboard Journal.

http://www.musicmansteve.com/strings/strings.htm #ephemera #music #vintage

I need a goddamned "getting your early 20's guitar mojo back" life coach, lol

This morning’s gear-chasing fixation: the Digi-Tech Trio+ looping pedal.

(I haven’t read any in depth reviews or watched any videos yet but the auto bass+drum accompaniment feature seems *very* compelling as a practice and songwriting tool, if it works)

I was reminded that the jug band jam I was going to go to was 1 year ago today. The last update on the event page was along the lines of "The session is on but please stay home if you're not feeling well" and boy did that seem like a bad idea based on pretty much *everything* in the news by that point. I stayed home.

Amazing to think that people were still just, like, out and about doing shit without masks in March of last year. I don't remember when my state locked shit down and mandated masks but I feel like it was another week or so.