Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Something I was going to write last night but didn't get around to: on the way home from silmaril's party, I had to detour around the block of US-1 that had an overturned car in the middle of it. The wrecker arrived while I was working my way around on back streets, and I was tempted to stay and find out how they were going to right it, but I decided I was already late enough getting home.

Approaching Baltimore from the south, on a clear winter night -- one of those nights when the air from buildingtops to the ground has a sharpness to it whether the sky is overcast or not -- you see the downtown skyline and the glow of the large, well-lit buildings there, and then you notice the twinkling lights of the smaller buildings, houses, and streetlights before and around the center of town, and it's very much like seeing the stars except that you're looking forward instead of up. Groundstars. Constellations of them. A galaxy twinkling on the hills of Baltimore and its closest suburbs.

I need to try to write that better when I'm more awake. Or when I'm completely zoned and don't know how tired I am.

Right now I know how tired I am[6]. the rehearsal went well, apart from my having to leave in the middle; the drive to it involved only an ordinary amount of flaming other-driver idiocy, and except for missing my exit, the drive from there to Winterfest was reasonable -- slower than I would have liked, but not painfully so. I got to the gig late enough for maugorn to be annoyed at having had no help carrying the sound system in but early enough that helping with what was left of setup was unhurried. But sound-check merged right into playing backgound music for the arriving audience before the event got into full swing, so I had no breaks, no downtime, no rest from the time I started loading my car at home until now (I did find a spot off to the side during the storyteller's set where I could close my eyes for a few minutes and try (unsuccessfully) to unkink my back, but that was pretty late in the program). That's FAR too long for my body to handle without rest, and my fibromyalgia is being pretty nasty on that score.

OTOH, I'm feeling extremely well fed. Lots of food at this gig, and I liked most of it.

From waist to armpits, I am pain. You could say that I "have pain" or that I am "in pain", but either of those would grossly understate the situation. My knees and calves hurt, my shoulders are stiff, my neck aches; but my torso is pain. I hope that I am exhausted enough for sleep to overtake the pain so I can not-feel it for a few hours of unconsciousness.

But the event went well and we played well. And I know we really should not learn an unfamiliar piece in front of an audience (I was figuring out / making up chords on the fly while Breno and silmaril sight-read the melody), but at that point we were feeling rather "on" and I let that feeling outvote my better judgement when Breno suggested it. (Having a really good night with a band is more than a little similar to getting high. I'n not sure which drug it most resembles though.) Fortunately, we got away with it; I wonder, if asked, whether any of the audience could have guessed which tune we'd never looked at before. I don't think they could have.

One thing I liked about tonight was the way the sound system worked out. maugorn brought a big (and old (which was why sixteen channels took up as much space as a Mackie would use for thirty-two (but he got it for free and there was enough room for it, so that's merely an observation, not a complaint))) mixer. So we had more than enough channels. Without ganging two mixers together. Without arguing about the best way to do it or whose approach was simpler and whose was unnecessarily complicated. And without using the very-nice-for-what-it-is-but-really-not-the-tool-for-this-type-of-gig itty bitty Mackie. (Absolutely love their medium-to-large boards but find their tiny ones ("we'll call four XLR channels and four stereo channels a twelve-channel mixer and then leave off some of the controls to make it more portable") limiting and terribly frustrating.) The board maugorn brought tonight lacked a few features I would have liked, but had all the features we really needed to make things work smoothly. And (this is a biggie) we had somebody whose job it was to tweak the board who wasn't also playing an instrument. Yaay! I think I play better in general when I feel I can relax about the sound system and the operation thereof.

Between last night, this afternoon, and tonight, I've had that bass recorder in my hands a heck of a lot. It's a good thing it's so comfortable to finger. (It's a Yamaha plastic crook-neck.) I guess it's also a good thing I like playing it. (But more and more often lately I catch myself lusting for a great-bass or even an extended great-bass.)

The one time I felt like I'd been thrown a curve was when maugorn said he wanted to play "The Enchanted Gypsy", and first I had to dredge up the percussion part I used to play in Wild Oats from a dusty and ill-lit corner of my memory, then I had to figure out how to translate what I used to do with yarn mallets on four Roto-Toms, onto just a small ashiko (half remembered from Pennsic but mostly re-invented -- I think I did okay, and I got a grin and a thumbs-up from Maug, but I didn't get a chance to ask anyone sitting out front whether the techniques I attempted really came through[*]). So I'm glad a couple of unexpected delays between his suggestion and our actually playing it gave me more time to remember and think through stuff for it. *whew* A few extra minutes helped. (Cool song. I'd have hated to do it half-assed.)

I think the Ultram I took when I got home is starting to work. Now my ribs and back just hurt a whole damned lot -- I've gone from being pain to "merely" feeling a lot of pain. Time to turn off the light and attempt that sleep thing I mentioned I was hoping for.

[*] An important (to me, anyhow) technique that I'm not completely sure about is the trick where you slide the edge of one hand across the head of the drum to change the pitch, while striking with the other, to produce a melodic effect despite the fact that you're playing basically untuned percussion. (Yeah, you've got a high sound -- tek and kah -- and a low sound -- dum[**] -- but neither of those is actually a recognizeable note (at least not a note in the scale the other instruments are using) any more than the way a snare drum, kick drum, or tom-tom is usually tuned.) I've seen this used to very dramatic effect on doumbeks by two much better drummers than I am[***], so I'm wondering whether my attempt came out reasonably cleanly, and whether it was loud enough to be effective. The song, at least the way we play it, really wants a particular run there on the drum, and I used to do it on a Roto-Tom[****] by leaning into it with the butt end of one of my mallets to change the tension on the head. (I couldn't turn the head to change the pitch that far quickly enough nor anywhere near accurately enough, and I didn't have enough Roto-Toms to dedicate a separate drum to each pitch I needed. Now if I'd been playing real kettle-drums and had about a year to practice, I might have been able to play that run with the pedal, but kettle drums are even more expensive than they are large, and I've only gotten to play those for one gig[*****] (a run of a community-theatre production of Antony And Cleopatra in which Felicia and I played a truly absurd number of instruments between us.)

[**] I'm using the doumbek names for the strokes 'cause I don't know the African names for them, and I've got absolutely no idea what to call the left-hand-dum stroke, which doesn't exist in Middle-Eastern drumming but does in African. Despite the Ashiko being an African drum, I usually hold it and play it as though it were a doumbek and use Middle-Eastern technique. However, on "The Enchanted Gypsy" I switched to holding it between my knees and did strike the center with my left hand, which was useful for the patterns I was trying to play but felt damned odd since I almost never do that. I really ought to make time to learn some African technique, patterns, and style even though it's a long way from my main interest. It's a set of tools which would come in handy.

[***] And listen to me holding forth about advanced drumming techniques as though I were a Real Drummer instead of a guitarist who plays just enough drums to get into trouble. Which reminds me, I need to work like mad on my tambourine technique if I'm going to play it in a concert in March and not sound like a dork. They would have to ask me to play the drum I'm least confident on, of course. (Come to think of it, that's an example of one kind of trouble my drumming is just good enough to get me into.)

[****] Depending on whom, you ask, Roto-Toms are either "tuned percussion" (like kettle-drums (tympani) and xylophones and unlike snare drums and tom-toms) or "semi-tuned" percussion inhabiting a funky special space in between toms and real tympani. I know that they seem to be tunable to notes, but it's a real pain to tell whether you've actually gottem them tuned to the note you want or not, and my electronic tuner hates 'em. Is that what 'semi-tuned" means? And are knackers tuned, untuned, or semi-tuned? I still want a set of knackers. (And for those of you mentally perverting the spelling and contemplating teasing me about it, yeah, I'd like to grow a set of those as well, but that's off-topic for this entry.)

[*****] [6] I've said this before and I'll say it again: Have you ever watched someone playing tympani and thought, "That looks like a Hell of a lot of fun"? Well let me tell you that all that tuning, the oh-so-serious listening to get the tuning right, and the long, long waits through pages of rests to get to the measures the kettle drums have any notes in, are all compensated for by the fact that playing the darned things is approximately three times as much fun as it looks like. You think it looks fun? Hit one a few times accompanying someone else and your whole fucking body will grin. I so wanna do that again! They don't just go "Boom!"; they go "Boom" in a peculiar, magickal, absofuckinglutely wonderfull, tympani-only, way.

[6] And if I've gotten to this many footnotes, then I already am too tired to notice how tired I am. Which means that I never should have started writing this, and should have just turned off the light and borrowed under the covers without logging on. Which I'll do now. Another footnote just crawled into my brain but I'm shoving it right back out again and not typing it.