Excitement in the air...

...as well as a cold that's quite bracing, especially for ol' tropical Florida. Long underwear sounds really good this week.

I was asked to write some tips on recording dulcimers for Mac owners over at Everything Dulcimer, and it's been posted here at the Dulcitunes links page.

Tomorrow night is the Dulcimer Central jam over at the Lippy's and I'm fully intending on making this one after missing the last few. Tonight, I plan on downloading a good amount of tablature to beef up my song book, a couple of numbers have been suggested by the members, so I'm on a hunt for those. Apparently, a couple can be found here at Tull Glazener's site.

I've been working on a demo for "April Fools" this week, recording drum, bass and dulcimer parts and adding a nifty banjo loop that I edited a bit in Garageband 3, which I picked up not too long ago. That's pretty much why I've been missing in action from the blog - been buried in the glorious playground of music recording!

That and dreaming of my future Dulcitar. I've been e-mailing about specs with the creator of the instrument, Doug MacCormack, and since each one is custom-made, I'm looking into the details. The big question is: do I want to go all chromatic or go with a slightly modified traditional set-up? (Meaning, in my mind, a 6+ and 3+ fret addition. Okay, maybe a 1+ too. Oh hell, maybe I'll just go chromatic...) I'm thinking that leaping into a chromatic mode will enable me to start writing in some of the other styles and keys I've been unable to deal with through traditional tuning. But then again, a standard fret set-up would be fine, given that I'll have to learn a whole different way of holding the dulcimer, playing it basically upside-down due to the configuration of strings. Unless I had it so that I could string it the opposite way. So many choices!

I still want to get a new acoustic, but the budget is saying "give me a break!" - so I put Joline into the shop to have Patrick re-fret her and also to see about fixing that busted support that keeps buzzing around. She's a perfectly fine dulcimer - been around the block a few times (okay, been around the country a few times) - so I'll hold off on getting a new acoustic for the meantime.

Gonna lay some vocals down now - we're set to rehearse this week on Wednesday and Friday - the show's getting close!