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Mountain Station
My and John's band: covers, originals, freak folk.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Bob and Janis are coming over this afternoon to play some tunes -- I'm eagerly anticipating my first jam using the custom shoulder rest I carved this morning. Ever since I got this fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on Odds & Ends last week.) Turns out I was right! It's extremely comfortable to hold the violin with this extension.
I've been listening to some old (well not that old I guess but from like last year) Mountain Station tracks lately and enjoying our sound. And it is just getting better -- our new "St. James Infirmary" is a different, more organized and complex song than our first recording of it.
Also -- bought a pickup for the fiddle, I decided to get a saxophone pickup that will clip onto the bell. This will help with amplification when we play at Studio 12 in Montclair next Friday.
Mountain Station is opening Friday's Songwriter Showcase at Studio 12 in Montclair. Come on time at 8 if you want to hear our music! -- We're doing two short sets, the first at 8 and the second later on after some of the featured acts have their sets. We'll be playing a couple of our old favorites and a couple of brand-new songs. Hope to see you there.
posted evening of October 19th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Mountain Station will be playing a gig in 2½ weeks, at the Crossroads in Garwood, a one hour set. Exciting! This week we are starting to figure out our set list. Here is an initial idea --
Mountain Station's show on Wednesday was a lot of fun -- we got a couple of people to come out and listen to us, we got a chance to play with amplification, played our whole set plus a couple of spur-of-the-moment songs, got a chance to play with Kari sitting in on vocals...
Ellen got a tape of us playing "Dancing Barefoot" on her phone -- the audio quality is a little strange but I think our sound comes across nicely.
(Update as of Saturday): We played the set through tonight and it took just about one hour. If we do everything the same speed on Thursday and without any screw-ups (there were a couple tonight which stretched the set out slightly), we will probably have space to play one more song, which will probably be NJ Transit.
Practice with John this afternoon was composed exclusively of almost-new and brand-new songs.
"Chinese Bones" -- we've abortively tried playing this a couple of times before, today was the first time it really came together, through the magical-seeming addition of a short capo on the second fret.
"Old Joe Clark" -- we've played this once or twice, how could we not have, but not for a long time. Sounded really nice.
"See Emily Play" -- this one will take some work, I'm excited about doing that work.
"Jug of Punch" -- we tried playing this (in honor of the Saint's day) a couple of times, it was sounding ok, suddenly John got the idea to speed it way up and completely alter the melody of it; and all of a sudden it was a Mountain Station song! Really fantastic. I will post a video later on.
"I've Just Seen a Face" -- what fun. We haven't done any Beatles covers but this one might be a keeper.
What happens when Mountain Station tries playing an old Irish drinking song? Liam Clancy says of this song that it's like St. Patrick's Day in the way it starts out beautifully melodic and rapidly deteriorates.
Well I think we have a bit of a head start on the deterioration aspect of it... With a little practice I think this is going to become a core bit of the Mountain Station catalog.
At The Millions, Hannah Gerson reflects on the Occupy Wall Street protests through the lens of Bartleby, and reflects on Bartleby through the lens of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on 
