Timothy's Blog

Timothy's blog on dulcimers, music, nature and life!
JUN
08

The great value of 'Repeat One'

The great value of 'Repeat One'

One of the great advantages of digital recordings --- CDs, .mp3s, etc. --- is that you can set up playback for shuffle/random, for repeating an album or playlist, or for repeating one track.

That last one, repeating a single track, is wonderful for getting your fill of a favorite piece without having to hit the ‘return’ button each time (or in the case of magnetic tapes of all kinds, setting zero and rewinding to it); but I also find tremendous value in the ‘repeat one’ feature of any playback system: for learning something new!

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4548 Hits
MAY
29

Thoughts about a great song, Phil Keaggy's 'Our Lives'

Thoughts about a great song, Phil Keaggy's 'Our Lives'

Last week as I played my iPod’s 22,000 tracks on random, a song came up that I hadn’t heard in quite some time, and it confronted me powerfully: ‘Our Lives’ by Phil Keaggy, one of the foremost guitarists of our time, and a profoundly distinctive singer-songwriter at times, too.  (See the video of it below.  But how about reading what I have to say about it first?)

When he was thirty years old, in 1980, he recorded this piece on the album Town to Town, and we got a copy at the time.  I remember our daughter Karen a couple of years later, as a baby, hearing this song as we drove in the car in the Jamestown area, and breaking out into excited singing and dancing in her car seat!

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5518 Hits
MAY
19

Acoustic environment

Acoustic environment

The place in which you play your instrument is part of the sound of your instrument --- always.

I could go so far as to say that the location where you’re playing is actually part of your instrument, in the sense that the sounds coming out of your instrument are dispersed to, and return from, surfaces that are sonically connected to the instrument.

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4617 Hits
MAY
05

Isolating a musical passage for practice

Isolating a musical passage for practice

If you’ve practiced music for a performance or audition or jurying, you’ve probably run across a passage that’s especially hard to get just right; in Classical music in particular there are lots of downright ‘virtuoso’ spots that need to have every note in place, or else they’re just wrong….

So it’s commonly known that you need to isolate a tough passage and play it over and over till it’s ready to be joined with the easier phrases.

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6084 Hits
APR
22

Llamas are among my fans!

Llamas are among my fans!

For a few years in the early 2000s I set up my booth to sell my CDs at a marvelous weekend festival in Chesapeake, Virginia --- an event that focused on celebrating natural fibers such as wool.  Sheep dogs showed their amazing herding abilities; weavers and spinners demonstrated theirs.  My booth was on the outer edge of a huge white tent with sides, but the first year I was there it was quite hot, so the walls were removed to let air in.

As usual I was playing away at the hammered dulcimer, when… I felt the presence of observers from behind me.  You know how that ‘sixth sense’ somehow can tell there’s someone there?

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4331 Hits

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