Banjos & Such @mayor@banjo.town

Poking around forums and reading all the Very Informed Opinions about the best super-thick artisanal picks made out of buffalo horn etc

…I’ve gone near it a couple of times over the years but now I find myself teetering on the brink of the jazz manouche rabbit hole

…ah! Haven’t tested whether this is in the current release yet, but at least it’s been merged https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/22149

This week's #banjototw over in instragram is 'Shaving a Dead Man,' whose original title is extremely racist.

Today I learned that people also call it "Protect the Innocent" (in reaction to objections over the original racist title) and I really can't parse that as anything but a great big dog whistle.

...like, at first blush it seems apologetic but the context here is "protect the innocent racists who just want to keep using their favorite racist song titles"

I'm going to call this tune 'Shaving a Dead Racist' from now on

Whoooops server filled up with attachments and crashed

(Good thing my 3-account instance is storing 11 gigabytes' worth of avatars and header images with no way to prune them)

…maybe not, I had forgotten that there is at least some of the rest of an upright piano in pieces up there too. But the keys in the basket are in various stages of having been repainted where veneer chipped off etc.

Maybe I’ll work up the nerve to ask my neighbor, who grew up in this house, if he knows anything about it. Like, I don’t think it was a “don’t want to pay somebody to haul this old piano away” situation, they would have just thrown it outside (going by other evidence)

how to reassemble old piano

Rediscovered in my attic last night: a bushel basket full of old piano keys left by the previous owner. I think they might actually be piano keys grafted into somebody’s unfinished homemade mad scientist project

(I am pleased to report that this works well with a vintage-style two-foot bridge)

🤌

This thing is for sale for $20 but I do *not* have room for it, nor room to tinker on it because it probably doesn't work

On the one hand the internet is an amazing resource for learning about musical gear

On the other, it allows people to get so far up their own ass about researching gear that you see posts like “I just ordered a guitar that I’ve never played with pickups I’ve never heard in person, what pickups should I order because I read on the internet that I’m not going to like the ones it comes with”