Review of 2023

Last folk club meeting of 2023

I carved out the time to practice regularly during this year, if only for 20 minutes a day, and this paid off. I should put more effort into learning new technique, but lack of time forces me to concentrate mainly on rehearsing songs for upcoming performance. 

My biggest achievement was reviving my Old Time repertoire with guitar. I hadn't played the guitar regularly since I was a teenager, and it wasn't something I'd used for regular public performance. I'd also not done the OT songs since 2019. But the songs came back and I learnt to play an alternating bass-strum Country Guitar pattern without too much trouble.

I also bought the Tenor Banjo and started doing my Irish tunes on it, which I can now play at least as well as I did on Mandolin. 

With the time spent on Guitar, I somewhat neglected the Irish Bouzouki but I am currently making up for that. 

Medieval Lute 2

My reproduction 4-course Medieval Lute, commissioned from luthier Jo Dusepo, arrived in March of last year. It was beautifully made and I was very pleased with it. 

Unfortunately, I’ve had more pressing Folk and Old Time projects which I had to bring up to speed. As those projects have now stabilised, I can finally give the Lute more attention.

The Lute has a very different feel from my other instruments, mainly because of the bowl back and lightness, but all my stringed instruments are held slightly differently and it's just a question of getting used to it. 

The tuners are friction as on a violin, not geared, and these take some getting used to. I broke one string tuning up, and one of the tied frets came off and had to be replaced. 

It produces a very reasonable volume which will be augmented by thickening up the melody. Melody will be absolutely central. I won't be using any post-Medieval triad chords with thirds. There's no point in having something like this and then treating it like a modern guitar. 

So my options will include doubling notes to create a more rhythmical pattern, strummed polyphonic and alternately picked drones. And then there are embellishments like slides and hammer-ons which seem to come naturally on stringed instruments. All these will be played with a Risha rather than fingers.

I've got a selection of melodies I want to play and these have been tabbed out in Musescore, so learning them is pretty straightforward. The rest is just fun and experiment.

Irish Tenor Banjo

Gold Tone AC-4 

Although I'll continue to play American Old Time fiddle tunes on Mandolin, I wanted a GDAE-tuned Tenor Banjo for Irish tunes. I've always liked the sound, and the resonance is more forgiving than trying to get a perfect tone on a mandolin. 

Besides choosing a specific make and model, the big questions were whether to go for 17 or 19 frets and an open or closed back. 17 frets is easier if you are used to the Mandolin, but there can apparently be intonation issues and a slack G-string problem in Irish (GDAE) tuning. So I decided to go for the longer scale if I could cope with the stretch and/or movement of hand position. This awaited actually trying a 19 which I finally managed in August. It was OK.

The closed back (with resonator) provides more volume but I don't expect to be throwing myself into dedicated Irish sessions and I found the resonator banjos very metallic. The open back ones have a sweeter tone.

I eventually decided on the Gold Tone AC-4 which has a two-way adjustable truss rod (lacking in some more expensive banjos) and is considered to be great value. It seemed proportionate to my beginner status and level of commitment shared, as it is, with so many other instruments. The included case is little more than a dust cover but I had a spare padded gig bag.

Transferring the Irish mandolin tunes to banjo was straightforward. Obviously I had to get use to the increased fret distances, but it essentially feels like playing the same instrument.