From October 2-24 I'll be driving all over Scandinavia. Anyone want a ride?
I'm doing another fine tour of Scandinavia for most of October, 2022. I'm based out of Copenhagen for the tour, but I'm doing it all by rental car, and I have room for passengers. If you can help pay for petrol, that's especially welcome.
The main drives I'll be doing that might be of interest:
October
5: Copenhagen to Arhus 6: Arhus to Copenhagen 8: Copenhagen to Jonkoping 9: Jonkoping to Copenhagen 14: Copenhagen to Arhus 15: Arhus to Roskilde 16: Copenhagen to Trondheim (via Gothenburg and Oslo) 18: Trondheim to Oslo 20: Oslo to Smedjebacken 21: Smedjebacken to Gothenburg 22: Gothenburg to Copenhagen
If anyone wants to join me on any of those drives, just drop me a line.
Seeking folks who play music, live in the area of Portland, Oregon, and have free time during school hours!
As of September, 2022, my kids are all in school, leaving me with a bit more time free. I'm a dedicated musician, away on tour now and then, but I'm home most of the time. I have no day job, so I particularly have time to play with during the morning and early afternoon on many weekdays when school is in session. If you play music, live in the Portland area, and have some kind of compatible schedule, I think we should probably meet up for a wee jam one of these days.
You don't need to be a great musician to play great music, as you may already know. If you have time free and the will to work out parts, amazing things can happen. I'm mainly a singer/songwriter. I play various instruments, but I don't sight-read or understand much theory. I'm interested in meeting folks who play music and have free time during school hours, whether it might become a regular thing involving public performances of original music or just informal jam sessions.
In terms of my own music, you can look up David Rovics and check it out. Working out renditions of my own songs with different musicians is of interest, but I'm also inclined to branch out and figure out parts to other stuff. The main instruments I've been playing a lot lately aside from my voice are acoustic steel-string guitar, mandola, Irish bouzouki, and electric cello. I'm especially interested in meeting folks who play bowed instruments of any kind and have some kind of grounding in a folk music tradition from somewhere in the world. Of particular interest to me are Appalachian, Celtic, and West African folk idioms.
I love this cello, but now they make one with frets, and I would love to make music with one of those...
Goal: $2,509
Raised so far: $220
This is a video of me and the brilliant Lorna McKinnon from a gig in England in 2016. I share it here specifically to highlight how cool the cello can be as an instrument to sing with. It was around this time that I recorded an album called Punk Baroque, that heavily featured this very cello, which I had successfully managed to crowdfund for the year before. It's a beautiful thing, made in the Czech Republic, and I play it a lot, still.
I grew up playing classical cello, and only much later in life discovered the great possibilities the instrument has as one to accompany vocals, or to occupy that sonic space that instruments like the guitar, accordian, or banjo more typically occupy. This was the idea I have been pursuing, on and off, with the NS Designs electric cello pictured above.
I found a lot of advantages to the electric cello, over acoustic cellos. Acoustic cellos are even more expensive, generally, and also very loud, by default, which makes them especially difficult to accompany vocals, unless you're singing opera (or otherwise very loudly). The electric cello can be very quiet, and also of course can be amplified for big audiences, when you're amplifying everything, and it sounds great that way, much better than trying to mic an acoustic cello.
But, as a guitarist and player of other fretted instruments, I was missing frets. I have pretty good intonation on fretless instruments, but the fact is, if you're playing a lot of chords or two-note combinations, especially while also singing into a mic at some possibly awkward angle, and possibly playing in a situation where you can't hear everything perfectly, it's too easy for one or more of the notes to be slightly off-pitch.
I was gifted with a gorgeous mandocello, which is a fretted instrument in the range of a cello, a wonderful thing which I treasure daily whenever I'm home, but as I've once again been getting into playing the cello, with a bow and all that, I once again started thinking about a cello with frets. The thoughts in my head got loud enough that I bothered doing a web search, and to my delight I discovered that a cello with frets does exist, and just about the only outfit making them is the same company that made the beautiful (and fretless) electric cello I'm sitting next to right now.
I'm probably a greedy man with too many instruments, but I figure it's still well within the realm of artistic license when for the most part I only have one of each type of instrument... Here's the particular instrument I'm seeking to obtain, on the website of the maker of them.
If you are an instrument faery and you're in a position to just buy the thing for me, it's in stock here!
