Journal Entry

:: Newness ::

I'm very excited. I've been in touch with Chicago's only bodhran maker, and he's currently working on a drum for me. For the first time in my life, I'll have an actual green drum. Yes! It's supposed to be finished in just under three weeks, and I can't wait.

Of course, now that I've gotten all excited about it, the one I have now (on loan from my teacher, with the option to buy, over which I've been going back and forth) is sounding really good. It must be getting jealous. I've been having trouble getting it sounding the way I want, so I messed around with the tuning yesterday. I guess I did something right, because it was sounding great today.

These drums use heads made of goatskin, which is extremely sensitive to humidity and temperature. Chicago's winters are very cold and dry, which tightens the heads up. With a tuneable drum you can easily tighten a drum that's too loose, but you can only go so far if the drum is too tight because of the weather. If you loosen them too much, the heads are in danger of just falling off the frame, or separating from one another (in the case of a two or three skin drum). Your drum will sound weird if the skins separate, but they're a pain to fix, so an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure in this case.

I'm not sure if it's the slightly warmer weather, the tuning, or what, but I was having fun practicing today. A well-tuned instrument sometimes feels like it plays itself.

On the nerd front, I got a little sick of the iframe business on this page, so I've gone to a more boring, webloggy layout while I try to think of something more interesting to do with this home page. I plan to do more, maybe add another color or two to the page (gasp!), but I'm not sure what I want to do yet, so this will do for now.