The New Scenes

As I mentioned last week, I bought a banjo recently. Last Saturday I made a trip to St. Louis to buy some more stuff from Music Folk. I was after a Martin D-35 and a dobro (square neck resonating guitar). They had the beginner dobro and an HD-35.

While I pretty much immediately bought the dobro, I waffled on the HD-35. Honestly, it just sounded too much like the Taylor I already own. I also realized I hadn't played enough Martin's to know how I want it to sound from my playing angle.

I love the D-35 sound that Tim Reynolds's guitar emits. While it has a lot to do with his brilliant technique, I also like the raw timbre of the song. It's powerful, distinct, and versatile. I also have an affinity for that Martin bluegrass sound from growing up listening to all those great country/bluegrass performers in my hometown. The Martin's I've tried at shops thus far have not excited me enough to spend the many dollars they cost.

I'll buy one, eventually. I also want to buy a pedal steel guitar at some point. I enjoy learning these instruments well enough to record some music with them (which is a pretty low bar as I edit things together extensively).

Anyway, I came home with the dobro and promptly rearranged my room.

I wanted to hang my instruments so that my Roomba could clean the floor without me having to rearrange things much.

I also got a living room refresh: 4 Philip's Hue lights and a new (new-to-me) couch. The couch is special to me. Even though it's a few decades old and has a few stains, it's very comfortable, and I remember it fondly. It used to be downstairs in my childhood home. I remember pulling out the spring bed 20 years ago and sleeping on it with friends after we spent all night playing Metal Gear Solid. We awoke early the next day to go to a morning breakfast at Weidinger Chevrolet for their anniversary and then off to a soccer game somewhere in another town in Mid-Missouri.

Another notable memory I have of that couch is being with my family watching the Thomas Crown Affair. I watched from the couch with my mom, and when a part came on that wasn't suitable for kids, she made us cover our heads with a blanket. I don't think she realized that we could see through the loose woven material.

I have other memories, but I'll spare the reader. It's my couch now and I'm happy to have it in my possession.

Functional Programming

I've been studying functional programming more these days. The team I'm temporarily on uses it a lot. Although I have some reservations about it's "improvements" over the more popular programming styles used in software development, it challenges me to think in new ways, and that's exciting! I'll likely be learning a bunch more this weekend in preparation for my last week sitting in on this team.

Sizable

We just mixed 4-5 more songs last night at Wil's studio. It's going well. We won't finish until early July because of scheduling with Wil, but we're really productive.

This album is all over the place stylistically, and I hope we can weave things together in the final order. Even if we can't, I'm pretty darn happy with the way the songs are turning out, and there are some gems in there!