Amita asked:
> > Washington, DC (USA) today (Sunday): I'll be performing at
> > 11:15 and 2:45 in the Music Tent with The Homespun Ceilidh Band.
>
> Glenn, that's so cool that you're in a piper's band. Do you play the
> pipes or the drums?
Actually, The Homespun Ceilidh Band is a fiddle band, not a pipe
band. I play guitar. (Other instruments, too, but guitar in that
band.) We're a nine-piece: two fiddles, two bodhrans, hammered
dulcimer, a person who doubles recorder and viola da gamba, one
who doubles flute and bouzouki, one who doubles cittern and guitar,
and I switch off betwen 6-string and 12-string guitars.
They put the pipe bands at the other end of the site from the
"Music Tent" -- the pipes are considered their own category. ;-)
(Technically, in the UK, the pipes were legally classified as
instruments of war, not musical instruments, for quite some
time. More a matter of politics and ethnic suppression than
a musical judgement, as I understand it, but the law stayed on
the books a long time after it stopped being relevant.)
(BTW, there's a piper on our CD, playing shuttle pipes on a
couple of sets.)
> I went to the Pipefest parade here in NY
> yesterday, and my friend and I decided we want to learn to play the
> drums. :)
Drums are fun. Those modern marching snares are downright scary
though -- especially if you play them indoors. Each strike is
like a rifle shot, and the heads are tensioned so tight they feel
solid. Whew!
I'm interested in an older style of snare drum, mostly 'cause I
also play "early music" and want something suitable for that.
I'll need to learn unmatched grip though -- so far I use matched
grip when I'm behind a drum set, but that doesn't work so well
for a drum hanging at your side.
> Hopefully got some good pictures of the parade (and of Sean Connery
> leading it), though nothing terribly creative...I'm still trying to
> get used to my new zoom lens.
Hope you got something good. Also hoping Tom, who showed up for
our second set today, got some good stuff! I didn't do much shooting
myself, having started the day already exhausted and becoming more
so from jumping around behind a guitar, but I did shoot some of the
highland dancers. (Finished off a roll of PJ800 that was already
loaded in the ME, and shot a roll of Provia 100F in the Super Program,
plus a roll of Fuji 100 in the Nishika 3D camera.) I was trying to
get the dancers with the Capitol dome in the background.
I tried to shoot some gulls overhead when the sun was low enough
to light their bellies, but as soon as I put the Long Glass on the
camera, they all vanished. Mean birds!
Next weekend it's a wedding with The Beltway Early Music Band on
Saturday and "Marching Through Time" (military re-enactors from
Vikings through WWII, in Glen Dale, MD) with Thrir Venstri Foetr
('Three Left Feet' -- renaissance dance and English country dance)
on Sunday; then the weekend after that it's The Homespun Ceilidh
Band at the WAMA "Crosstown Jam" in DC (19 April); then The Homespun
Ceilidh Band at the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival on the 27th.
My busy season has officially started!
And now I think I hear my bed calling me quite insistently. #Zonk!#
-- Glenn
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