Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Subtlety is a wonderful thing, although sometimes a sledge-hammer is more subtle than other tools." -- Roedy Green, "How To Write Unmaintainable Code [Ensure a job for life ;-)]"

Great weather for a festival today. (Okay, my fingers got cold at one point, but apart from that it was lovely.)

Am very very veryvery tired.

Had some good moments and some glitches performancewise. Fortunately the best playing was when we had the really large audience, and the worst of my mistakes were in front of the smallest audience of the day.

Bill & Becky had a schedule conflict, so Ruth C. sat in for Becky (good to see Ruth again -- didn't mean to let it get to be so long since the last time I saw her (uh, not counting rehearsal earlier this week)). Jennifer played the first two sets (of three), her first gig back with us since giving birth -- good to have her back!.

I broke one string -- one of the expensive "last N times longer than ordinary strings" set I'm trying out on the 12-string. (They're supposed to last longer before becoming "dead sounding"; I don't think the manufacturer makes any claims regarding resistance to breakage.) But it's one of the plain (i.e., not wound) strings, so I don't think replacing it with a different brand will matter.

Played right through fresh acrylic again, and took less playing time to do so than last month: exposed the tip of my thumbnail halfway through the day. (I applied several layers of Krazy Glue before our last set.) Maybe I was hitting unusually hard on the upstrokes today or something? 'Cause I had problems with my thumbnail squeaking, as well, but no problems with the other two nails that have acrylic on them. (And late in the day something took a notch out of my (unprotected) index finger nail[*] -- I'm not sure whether it happened onstage or off. I've been waiting for that one to grow back out to a comfortable playing length since Pennsic, and it was very nearly there. I've still got enough to work with; I just have to be very careful of hand position when I play the Butterfly Jig.)

Two dead transducers, one dead snake channel, and right at the end of the day the monitors mysteriously faded so Mike and I could barely hear the fiddles ... I guess it was the day for equipment problems. (The soundhole pickup I use on my six-string wasn't putting out any signal, and the lavalier condenser mic our soundman handed me to use instead (and which I've used in the past) turned out to also have died. So I was stuck in place in front of a mic stand when I used one guitar.[**] I don't remember who got the bad channel, but fortunately there was one unused channel left to move them to. There are three things that make you really appreciate having a kickass engineer: 1) when things go wrong, like today, and you're glad he's on top of them; 2) when things go more perfectly than it seems one has a right to expect (we've had those days, or at least it seemed that way from the stage -- I don't know what gremlins Allon has had to quash on those days to make it seem that way); and 3) when you have to play with a different engineer and notice the contrast.

And what I'd planned as a brief "weather was good, played gig, am very tired" update has turned into ... well, I'm rambling. Which usually means that I'm even more tired than I've realized, and should be going to bed instead of typing this.

[*] I prefer the feeling of greater control of the natural nail when picking melody, which is most of what my index finger gets used for, and most of the really heavy wear comes from strumming (which I do mostly with my thumb, middle, and ring fingers), so the index finger nail has no acrylic on it. Except ... sometimes I really want the extra volume that a reinforced nail can provide (it's the difference between a thin-but-not-floppy pick and a heavy pick, in both speed/control and volume) so I wind up picking with my middle finger then even though I don't like that tone as much. I know, I know, I want to have my cake and eat it too.

[**] I played the first set entirely on the twelve-string, because there wasn't enough time to go to plan-B. For the other two sets, once it was clear I'd need to use a stand mic, I went through the set lists and decided the tunes I was most going to want to move around on were ones that I play on the siz-string, so I moved the twelve-string's clip-on mic over to the six, and let the twelve be the one I was stuck in one spot on the stage to play. I hate feeling nailed in place like that. I have to remind myself not to move off-pattern for the mic, and that's distracting. And I feel as though I'm doing without some of my tools for communicating with the audience, and playing the guitar behind my head is out.