The great banjo adventure...

My banjo arrived yesterday! (Hooray!) And can I just say, for someone who is not at all musically inclined, the banjo seems to suit me.

It arrived mid afternoon, mere moments after I'd gotten off the phone with Goose. She immediately called back to tell me it was just stunning and that she would get it set up and tuned for me by the time I got off work.

When she came to take me to pick up my bike that afternoon I wanted all the details. She looked at me and said, 'we'll talk about it later'.

Que?

Later?

What's wrong with now?

She looked at me, pained expression on her face and sheepishly said, 'I can't get it to make any noise'.

Um...it's a banjo. That's what they do. They make noise. Plus I paid extra to get one with a resonator on it, so it should make lots of noise. What do you mean it doesn't make noise? What kind of noise is it making then?

Um, well, it kind of sounds like an electric guitar that's not plugged in.

???
Clearly you're doing something wrong. Did you take all the packaging off?

Of course I took all the packaging off! Also the strings are out of order and the whole thing doesn't make any sense. It's also impossible to tune. You'll see. Maybe you can figure it out.

Oy vey.

So I get done with class and head home to my banjo. It is indeed beautiful, but also strangely quiet...and the strings ARE out of order.

Now, I admittedly, am not musically gifted. At. All. My mother brought a piano home one day when I was in grade school. I diligently attended lessons. I practiced and practiced. I learned my theory, and yet my sister almost effortlessly, was playing circles around me in no time. I spent days reading sheet music trying to learn things, and she picked the same songs up by ear, mostly from listening to me struggle. In the fifth grade I picked up the flute. This was mainly an excuse to get out of class. I'd just switched over to public school rather suddenly and was both incredibly socially awkward and way ahead of my class in most if not all subjects. That also did not last. Particularly since the neighbor picked up the flute at the same time and made it a point to learn everything twice as fast. As an adult, I bought myself a guitar. I took some lessons, learned a few things, but mostly my tiny little hands were not built for a full sized guitar, something I had failed to take into account when buying it and I decided music was just not my thing.

So here I sit. Alone on my couch with a banjo. Baffled at the muted sound coming from it and the odd arrangement of strings. I spent a good hour trying to tune it, convinced that that was all it needed, but it WAS impossible to tune.

The googling began in earnest somewhere around here. Now, there is a lot of info out there on banjos, on buying your first banjo, on how to care for you banjo, on how to set up your banjo and so on. However all of this information makes one basic assumption; that you know something, ANYTHING about the instrument in your hands. I did not.

I sat there. Staring at it. Irritated beyond belief at it's inability to comply with my wishes. I stared and stared. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. The more I stared, the more I thought something didn't look right about it. The more I thought it looked wrong, the more wrong it started to look. Damn my insufficient research! Damn my lack of knowledge regarding stringed instruments, of instruments of any kind!

Clearly I should have bought an accordion.

That's when genius struck me. If I feel the banjo is MISSING something, why don't I just google it and find out what it should look like?
Duh.
So I pull up a picture of my banjo. The picture on the screen seemed somehow in-congruent with the banjo in front of me...but how....

I sat there, for a long time, like a little kid with a Highlights magazine, trying to figure out which of the images was different and why. It was hard. Totally not my finest moment. And then I saw it. The problem. The missing piece. The solution to all my banjo worries. That little thing that holds up the strings...my banjo did not have that.

I frantically tear around the house looking for the box. Cursing Goose and her inattention to detail. SHE'S the music person. How on earth could she miss that! Ugh! The box was nowhere to be found.

I stood outside, in my bare feet and my blue dress, at the foot of the dumpster. To climb in or not to climb in?

I call Goose. She directs me to all the things that came with my banjo. My receipt, care instructions, info, and a bag of tools. Inside I found the saddle. The little missing piece. I nearly did a back flip.

Knowing what's missing is all fine and well. Figuring out how to fix it is another all together. I debated, for a while, removing all the strings so that I could get it on there. I decided that would probably end badly. Both for me and the banjo. I tried sliding it under the strings, but it didn't fit. I sat. Confused. Frustrated. Flipping the little piece about my fingers.

LOOSEN THE STRINGS LITTLEFOOT!
Obvious.

After a struggle even Captain Ahab would be impressed with the piece was in place. A couple of youtube videos later and it was in the correct location, and I set about trying to tune it. I failed spectacularly at this. It seems that I can only tell whether a note is flat or sharp when I am not the source of that note. Since I lacked an electric tuner (yet more evidence of my poor planning) tuning by ear turned into a disaster. I did however, manage to tune two strings to the same note. Both of them flat apparently, and not the correct note, but the same note none the less.

I abandoned tuning.

For the rest of the night I tinkered around on my grossly out of tune instrument. It seems the one thing I have going for me in this whole glorious misadventure is that finger picking comes naturally to me. I learned a couple of rolls and was pleased, my faith restored.

Goose came home and tuned it for me. I laughed at her for not noticing the saddle was missing. I mean, that's an acceptable oversight for me, given my extremely limited knowledge of....anything musical, but she's been playing the guitar since she was a kid. She totally should have seen that. CLEARLY this was more her fault than mine, right. ;)


So that's where we stand right now. I'll be working on chords and rolls for the next couple of weeks and as soon as I can play something worthy of a first grade music recital I'll be sure and post it for you. Then we can laugh along together, you and I.


I haven't heard from you in what seems like ages, though I'm sure it's only been a couple of days. We worry about you often, and miss you most every moment. We are glad the little piggy has settled into his condo, and pray to the powers that be that bun-bun comes home soon. I hope things are getting better...all around. That BINGO hasn't driven you mad, and that you aren't as we speak morphing into an old BINGO lady. Lots of love to you Dear Friend. Lots of love.