My banjo needs a new bridge

[ritaxis]

So I had lent my banjo out and I just got it back, and I'm very glad to have it, but I need to get a new bridge for it.

I'm not an accomplished musician. I play for my own enjoyment, when I feel like it. Sometimes this causes a dilemma. People think I'm being weird and rude and ungenerous if I don't play for them, but if I do play for them they're embarrassed for me because I'm really that unaccomplished. And no, it's not "not as bad as I think it is" -- I can't even tune to a tuning fork or pitchpipe or other person's instrument, I can only tune the banjo to itself, and then only with great difficulty. I know only a handful of tunes that I learned by ear. I can puzzle out the notes on sheet music, but slowly and with difficulty and it's not worth doing most of the time. But I can have a lot of fun banging away on my banjo.

I can sing in a group, when I find myself there. But my banjo playing is not a group activity.

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Additionally the banjo is one of the more difficult musical instruments to master.

They're also heavy, which makes for even more difficulty in management.

Love, C.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I vividly recall the spring and summer that el V worked to learn to play the banjo because a dear friend, who is a composer and bandleader, decided he wanted banjo in upcoming concert of his own new music, and he decided el V was the right guy.

El V's a guitarist. Though he of course plays a variety of electric guitars (which, too, are heavy suckers), his first instrument, what he formally studied, both here and in Spain, is Spanish classical guitar.

He struggled. Moreover pickup and so on had been installed so it could be electric, making it even heavier.\

At the same time, by serendipity, I read Madison Smartt Bell's Soldier's Joy, which has a Vietnam vet protagonist, who spends much of the time sitting on the porch of his daddy's Tennessee farm house, woodshedding with the banjo, which he is struggling to learn to play. "Soldier's Joy," as you would know, is THE banjo classic.

This is before I met Madison, before we all became friends. I was so impressed with this novel -- especially as I could tell from what was going on in OUR kitchen that Madison had gotten everything right about his character working on learning to play banjo.

Love, C.