I have not posted anything here in quite some time. I've noticed that many people have ditched Myspace for Facebook recently, so who knows if anybody even reads these anymore. Do not confuse my staying with Myspace for brand loyalty; it is simply disinterest. I checked out Facebook, and I hate to tell ya – it's the same thing as Myspace. I already went through all this bullshit with adding a bunch of fake internet friends with Myspace, and it wasn't so much fun that I wish to repeat the entire process with Facebook. Besides, would I have to do it again when something replaces Facebook? It's inevitable. Facebook, too, shall pass.  Cyworld.com, here I come!  Gotta up my profile in Korea!

In fact, I have become rather disenchanted with the time-wasting aspects of the interwebs of late. Twitter? Really? If I write more than 140 characters, do the terrorists win? I was already tired of hearing about Twitter from SXSW (see here, here, here, here, and probably a million other terrible articles about terrible bands using Twitter in an attempt to promote their terrible music), and I am sad to see that it hasn't died since then.

Interested parties may have noticed that I haven't played that many shows of late. I'm not busy building up my Facebook numbers. Or Twittering. Or putting sad little attempts at creative writing projects up as “reviews” on Yelp. What the hell have I been doing? Malcolm Gladwell's “Outliers” suggests that people require 10,000 hours of practice to master a particular skill (I mention the book because I just read it, not because I give it a glowing endorsement.  Outliers is really more of a pamphlet than a book, you can read it in about 15 minutes. Here's my online consumer review: it's okay). I don't think Myspace posts, Tweets, Facebook friends, or Yelp reviews count towards this total. So I haven't been doing any of that shit.

When I got back from my European tour at the end of last year, I had come to the realization that I was kind of bored with the one man band in it's current incarnation and I wanted to do something different. Frankly, the current music scene (Austin and everywhere else) is dead right now and is pretty boring all around. In my previous bands I had always felt like there were lots of better bands, and was kept on my toes a bit by that fact. Today, not that I feel like I'm better than every other band in existence, but there hasn't been anything new and exciting that's raised my pulse recently. I haven't heard any new albums that have excited me, and I haven't been knocked out by any live shows. I also haven't had any recommendations from my network of operatives that have led me to believe that I was missing out on anything.  I've been listening primarily to stuff recorded before World War II.  So, after the tour I was feeling a bit bored. I felt hemmed in by only playing the guitar, harmonica, and drums. I had covered Dock Boggs on my last record (“Down South Blues”), but some of the covers I wanted to do just didn't sound right on guitar, particularly the Uncle Dave Macon songs. So why not actually learn how to play them on banjo?

So, I bought a bottom-of-the-line open-back starter banjo at the beginning of this year and began to practice. I am learning clawhammer style, not bluegrass or Scruggs-style, and playing primarily old timey country, not bluegrass. As I like both, I think it's funny that the banjo players are pretty strident as to whether they are in the clawhammer or bluegrass camp (they will no-doubt be horrified to see me playing it through a guitar amp and cranking the shit out of it). The differences between the styles are explained somewhat here, here, and here. But it's easier to explain it in a Hee Haw context: Bluegrass is Roy Clark, clawhammer is Grandpa Jones:

One thing that is amazing to me is how much easier it is to learn an instrument now then it was back when I was a kid and started to learn guitar. Now you can go on Youtube and find a million people giving lessons, teaching you how to play a particular song, demonstrating different techniques, etc. I was talking to one of the guys at South Austin Music, and he said it used to be surprising 10 years ago when some little kid would come in who could totally shred on guitar, but now it's an almost daily occurrence. The guitar technique of our nation's youth have expanded exponentially in the internet era! Too bad this hasn't been accompanied by an increase in musical quality, but hey, at least they ain't all just playing Guitar Hero.

Anyway, compared to the number of guitar-related books out there, the pickin's is slim for clawhammer banjo instruction. I have found Ken Perlman's “Clawhammer Style Banjo” book and dvd combo pretty helpful, although it is not perfect. If you already play guitar, most of your knowledge transfers, and you are losing one and a half strings so it's pretty easy on the left hand. The right hand, however, has to learn the frailing or clawhammer motion. Basically, you have to sit around and just do the same hand motion over and over again until it becomes second nature.

This guy is kind of annoying, but he does give a nice explanation of how to do the basic bum-ditty strum (and is a perfect example of the kind of free knowledge you can now find on the internet):

Another book of interest to banjo nerds is “That Half-Barbaric Twang” by Karen Linn. This social history of the banjo isn't about the music as much as it is about the perception of the banjo in American culture. The story of how the banjo went from being an instrument associated primarily with plantation slaves, to being a parlor instrument playing light-classical numbers, to finally being seen as the instrument of poor white southerners, is fascinating.

So, in case you wondered, this is what I've been doing. I traded in my bottom of the line model for a Gold Tone CC-100 (pictured below), which is more of a solid instrument.  I am still far short of 10,000 hours, but I've been playing for several months now and I've reached the point of not-badness to enough of a degree that I may break it out at my next show. I remember the Dead Brothers saying something in the Voodoo Rhythm documentary about how playing a banjo was more punk rock now than playing a guitar.  We shall see.

Too bad I just wasted the time I spent typing this, when I could have been practicing.  Did I mention that playing clawhammer banjo is pretty fun?  Yeah, its pretty fucking fun.