Electric Banshee Kazoo Mask

Here's a trial run of my new electric cigar box kazoo and banshee mask. It's actually just a low quality microphone made with a piezo disk attached to a plastic diaphragm. Mounts on a mic stand. Offers some cool possibilities on stage.

First Time on a Horse

So, I've been working with horses for while at Heads Up! Therapeutic Riding and we own three ponies - two retired from Heads Up! (yeah, I'm a soft hearted sucker, lol) and one an ill thought-out gift to (step-daughter) Rachel from her dad... but had never riden a horse - for one thing, all the ponies I know are too small to carry my 287 lbs. - until yesterday.

Recently, Heads Up! acquired some new horses (not ponies this time) and one of them, Tonka, a pinto gelding, at 1200 some lbs is just big enough to carry me. And Heads Up! is offering adult riding lessons as a fund raiser for our main focus of providing hippo-therapy and therapeutic riding for special needs kids.

Tonka is fairly new to the program and I haven't worked with him much... just caught him and led him to where he was to be groomed for a lesson a couple of times... and had already had to "explain" personal space to him a couple of times. He likes to push his nose right into your face - a problem coming from a 1200 lb animal. He seems very friendly about it, but I'm told that this is a serious dominance challenge, so I take it seriously.

So I went with Rebekah for a group lesson yesterday. Rebekah had had a couple of lessons already. As it turns out, the other student in our group had to cancel and Camille, the instructor, was training another instructor, Kate... so we actually ended up having one-on-one lessons with the two instructors. Very cool.

I groomed and tacked Tonka under Kate's supervision - I mostly knew how to do this of course, since I've been doing it for Heads Up! lessons. But I did learn some things about saddles - we mostly use surcingles for the kids.

For the actual riding I was working with Camille, who is a very talented instructor. The first two minutes on the horse were really scary... I felt like I was about to fall off even standing still. How am I going to stay on when he starts walking?

But a couple of minutes later, it wasn't so bad - I guess my body was adjusting to the new requirements. Of course, I've been participating in lessons in which kids learn to ride for a couple of years now and had lots of examples to model... that helped a lot. My training in aikido helped too - weight under, balance, breathe - all applicable to horse riding too.

A lot of horse control is done with the legs... and it hurts - at least at first. Squeezing the horse uses a couple of muscles on the inside of the thighs that don't get used for anything else. (Well, I think women use them for something else, but men don't.) I expected to be in real pain today, but oddly, it's just a little soreness in those two muscles - otherwise I'm feeling good.

Funny thing is, during the ride, I felt like I was sticking my legs out in all different directions trying to signal the horse... felt like I was getting waaaay off balance and would fall at any moment. But, when I looked at my legs while I was doing this, I discovered that the leg motions were not visually detectable - at least from where I was sitting. The leg motions that signal the horse are really tiny... amazingly so.

Overall, I learned a lot and I'll be back. Next time trotting. Rachel has ridden Tonka and says he has a very smooth gait trotting, so it shouldn't be bad.

Blues Jam Special No. 13

Recently, I've been attending the biweekly blues jam at the Broad Street Cafe in Durham, NC. I've been playing bass on the Kickin' Bass - which works out fine, and also acting as band leader while playing guitar on the Cyclops and singing...

That's led to a few problems:

First, and most shocking, I found that some of the other players don't know much about blues before about 1970... so when I called for "Back Door Man" - what I thought would be a conservative choice that everyone would know - I just got blank stares... and I never did get them to play the chords right. I guess after 1970, no one ever stayed on the "I" through the second four, lol. Since then, I've tried much easier songs with less deviation from the stock 12 bar formula... but any deviation seems to throw them off, unless it's a blues/rock/jazz song that they already know. ("Summertime" works OK. So does "Stormy Monday"). Now I don't want this to sound like I'm bitching about my fellow players - this is a much a failure of my pickup band leadership as anything - a new skill I need to learn, lol.

Second, I really need much more volume in my solos than at other times - but the Cyclops doesn't have a volume control.

Third, I find that the bottom two strings really kind of interfere with the bass player's part, more than add anything useful to the mix.

And finally, there's one guy there who seems to be unable to play in any key I ever sing in... but apparently, he can play in C.

So what does a cigar box guitar player do to solve some problems? Why, build a new guitar of course!

So that brings us to the Blues Jam Special No. 13. (No. 13, because it's my 13th instrument of 2009).Four strings, tuned CEGc - ideal for playing blues in C without interfering with the bass- and a hand wound pickup, which allowed me to add a volume control (I'm not convinced a volume control would work with the piezos I usually use)

So next blues jam, I'll show up with the Blues Jam Special No. 13 and three songs in strict 12 bar form in C and see if we can make it work. The songs I've chosen are "Ninth Street Blues", "Good Morning Blues" (Ledbetter), and "Old Willie".

Here's a sample of what the Blues Jam Special No. 13 sounds like. This was recorded straight into the computer from the pickup with no effects. Download a Sample Tune.

Faith

Living without faith is like driving in the fog...

Living with faith is like driving in the fog... and knowing it's OK.

What a haul!!!

Habitat for Humanity is organizing a Memorial Day shindig in Pittsboro, NC... and I've agreed to play a set of cigar box guitar music...

And teach a workshop on building cigar box guitars.

But, whoops... I'm pretty much out of cigar boxes.

So Rebekah and I headed off today and found our way to K&S Tobacco on NC-55 in Cary, NC and lo and behold, they had a bunch of cigar boxes.

I picked out the 17 in the picture above... total price $10. Wow!

While there, we stopped at the nearby Home Depot and picked up some dowels to use for the necks. Now I'm all set for the workshop.

A Simple Cigarbox Harp

I was at a show the other night and got to talking to an elementary school art teacher there. She was interested in how she might apply what I was doing with instrument building to a project for her class.



So, I suggested wrapping 5 rubber bands around a cardboard cigarbox and sliding a pencil under them for a bridge. Putting the pencil at an angle gives each rubber band "string" a different pitch.

My original plan called for two pencil bridges, but when I sat down to actually build a proof-of-concept model, it turned out that only one was needed.

And it sounds pretty good: Click here to hear it.

At the risk of being called snarky...

So this guy got caught shoplifting... but was released without charge when he offered this defense: "Sure, it's illegal, but look at all the great stuff I got!"

Wait! No! I got that wrong...

It wasn't shoplifting... He got caught torturing prisoners! Guess that defense works for war crimes.

Wasn't he the same guy who was criticizing liberals for situational morality?

Been Tying my Shoe Laces Wrong! Yikes!

Yeah, I heard on the BBC a few days ago that most people tie their shoes wrong... The basic issue is whether you're tying a granny knot bow (wrong) or a square knot bow (right). Click here for the BBC report.

Now, I learned to tie my shoes when I was 5 years old... I learned the difference between a square knot and a granny knot when I was a teenager. So I didn't get it right at 5 and been tying them wrong ever since.

And recently, I've been having trouble with the boots I wear on stage coming untied - very annoying in the middle of a show, lol.

So, I sat down and analyzed just what I was doing when I tie my shoes... and sure enough, I was tying a granny knot.

Now the trick to a square knot is to go "right over left; left over right" as you tie it. My final motion with the loops is very automatic and would be hard to change, but just changing which string goes over on the first cross makes it "left over right; right over left" - just as good as the standard format - and gives me a correct knot.

So now my boots look better (Check out the BBC link to see what I mean) and I don't have to worry about tripping on my shoe laces on stage.

Stone Soup

You know, that old story about the itinerant beggar who filled a kettle with water, put a stone in it, and started cooking "stone soup".

I heard this story again on WUNC - my local NPR station - the other day as a lead-in to a review of some cooking books.

Of course, the story continues with everyone in the village contributing something they had been hoarding and there was enough soup for everyone.

I've always thought of this as a sort of trick the beggar played on the village - for their own good - pretending to make soup from a stone. I think that's how most of us see the story. Who would put a stone in soup?

But maybe not...

Salt is one of the primary ingredients in soup. In our culture of plenty - our poorest beggar lives as well as the royalty of the middle ages - salt is a given... but that wasn't always true. You know, Rome grew to an empire initially because they controlled the supply of salt in their region.

What if the beggar's soup stone was actually a salt-containing rock. Were such rocks in common use in the culture which originated that story. The beggar may not have been playing a trick, but instead providing a critical component of the soup.

How did the author of this story see it? Was the moral of the story totally different from the one we see now?