so, when banjobarb says 'dragged', she maybe exaggerates a little. i am a willing participant in this thing! i mean, who doesn't love the BANJO, for god's sake? have you *seen* the muppet movie? come on. anyway. last night was our first class.
while banjoleon predictably has his own banjo already (you didn't see that coming?), banjobarb and i are renters from our school's store. very helpfully, the guy who hooked us up seemed knowledgeable and totally tuned our banjos for us -- so when we got to the class and everyone else was fumbling around and the instructor was going around from person to person saying things like 'higher, higher, no, higher still, keep going, higher, no! stop! too high! go back the other way. lower. stop! now higher! no, now lower again' (no lie, at one point he dropped to his knees to illustrate a point), he got to us and was like -- great! this side of the room is good. it was like we scored points without even trying.
it was awesome to start with that small positive, because there was a lot of not great music happening in that class, and i know for a fact that quite a bit of it was coming from *my* banjo. maybe it's just because i haven't named it yet? but! we learned the basic clawhammer technique (relax your hands, yo), a few chords (G is seriously the best, you guys, because you DON'T HAVE TO USE THE FRETS AT ALL), and then we practiced a song together and even SANG a little bit. in a kind of inhibited, slightly embarrassed way. and it was good, clean, awkward fun! i mean, i'm pretty far away from backing up like, langhorne slim or anything, and i think for the next couple of days i might not actually have fingerprints on the index and middle fingers of my left hand, but . . . all in all, i'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about this experiment.
and next week we're starting MELODIES. yeah, you heard me. melodies. tell your friends.
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