new thingies -- an intro

I'm currently messing about with two "crossover instruments", and having a mixed bag of success. To begin the morning, let it be known that my very best stringed friend is sometimes called (in error) a crossover, and I am thus inclined toward friendship with any similar instrument.

OK, that didn't even make a lot of sense to me, so I'll expand and see if it works any better.

I have played a 6-string banjo since the middle 1960's. It is not a banjitar, it is not a guitjo, it is not something that lazy guitar players use to sound as if they know how to play a "real" (5-string) banjo.

It is its own thing, just as the tenor (4-string) banjo and the baritone banjo and the whole soprano - alto - baritone - bass range of 'classical' banjos from the late 19th to mid 20th Century are real banjos, and the banjo uke is what most people on the far side of the Atlantic (from here in the U.S.) think of when they hear the word "uke", thanks to the great George Formby.

Either just before or just after I got out of high school, my father handed me a strange looking case and suggested I try and figure out how it was supposed to be played. That got interesting. It's has a round body with a skin head, but no separate resonator. The sides and back are a solid unit, and the head is pushed down by a metal plate rather than being pulled down by spaced hooks. The "sound holes" are piercings in the plate. So it has greater attack than a guitar, and more sustain than a banjo. It has a softer sound, thanks to the natural head and enclosed sound box. But it is tuned like a guitar. Put any other tuning on it, and it doesn't work all that well. It obviously can't be frailed like a banjo, and strumming a series of chords gets more than a little muddy.

It was made in Catania, Sicily. There are records that have these things being made in Sicily in the 18th Century and pictorial evidence for the middle 15th Century (I lost the price of dinner by disbelieving both points while spending time in the area courtesy of NATO).

To summarize, instruments deserve to be appreciated on their own merits. At one time, this was the rule, but recent decades have dictated tighter definitions and design specs for each instrument. Part of our social tendency of making a virtue out of necessity, perhaps. Placing a value on tighter limits make mass-produced products more acceptable.

Right, winding down now. I'll leave it here and speak of my two new friends anon.

Cheers

For some reason, I leave doing these things until the candle hours of the morning. Thus, I face the choice of posting prematurely or taking the time to write shorter. Someday, I will become more succinct. I understand the odds on that being given by my colleagues equate roughly to those of me flapping my ears and flying to Mars. They are optimistic.

Crossovers and Comebacks, part one

Close to three years ago, I decided I could hold a piece of oak at the appropriate angle in a compound miter saw, rather than moving the back fence to the angle and letting that hold the wood. I had done this a few hundred times over the years, and had never had a problem. But as they say in the mutual fund fine print, past success is not a predictor of future success. The saw blade encountered a change in the wood's density, the blade caught for a moment, and the wood slammed into the back fence. The wood was uninjured, since it had three fingers of my left hand to break the impact.

I was lucky. I kept the fingers, even if they got pretty crunched. There were some small breaks in the last quarter inch of the middle and ring fingers, and I lost the feeling right on the ends of those fingers, but it could have been much worse. So I spent just over a year not being able to generate the force in two fingers to push a string down behind a fret. Not good for somebody who plays at various fretted instruments. Eventually, the various bone fragments quit moving around and stayed attached in the shape they would retain. The little problem of nerve damage on the fingertips never got any better, but I'm working with it.

Eventually, I started trying to get back to playing. I make psalteries and similar instruments, but my primary instruments have fretted strings. I started out by going through my guitars, figuring they would be the least difficult. An old Applause I picked up just off base when I was at Officer Training School turned out to be the most forgiving, with my nice new Epiphone the least forgiving.

More later, as I made some interesting discoveries along the way.