He's Heeeere......

Despite the first named tropical storm of the season swirling around outside, I went to work for a half-day and came back in time to meet the UPS truck. With rain spattering down upon the big brown box, I came back into the house and opened it up.

Wow.

First off, Doug was going to include a soft case with my purchase, but Jae sneakily contacted him and asked for an upgrade as an anniversary present and let me tell you, it's a mighty impressive case. I opened it up, caught a beautiful whiff of "new case smell" and let it wash over me, looking down at my new axe.

Wow.

What can I say except, "he's beautiful." Going back and forth throughout the day about what to name him, and at one point actually figuring that he would be a she after all, and with the storm sending the rain sideways, was going to call her "Wendy" (you know, "who's walking down the streets of the city", etc.) - but once I plugged this bad boy in and started cranking through some riffs, it was clear that it was indeed a boy, and the name that had been circulating through my head and heart was "Alberto." They arrived on the same day, didn't they?

Doug did a fantastic job - enclosing a note which gave me some technical pointers and suggestions for future routing and electronics work. Man, what a sound! With one pickup, it's pretty solid, but with two pickups kicked on, he fairly screams "ROCK ME BABY, ROCK ME ALLLL NIGHT LOOONG!" A tone that's crisp and clear, fat and frantic - especially running through the GNX2 module, which was finally up and running thanks to the delivery of an adapter yesterday. I tried tuning it to DDad (the bass strings are doubled instead of the melody and they are in reverse order) and went for the test - could I play standard dulcimer tunes in standard fashion? It wasn't coming easy, so I flipped him over and played it like a guitar. Thruummmmmmm. Much fun noodling that way for awhile.

Then I tried tuning it the way Doug had suggested: EEbe, which he said made it easier to jam along with guitarists. Just this whole step bump brought new life into the chords and, placing him on my lap, played Alberto in standard style and, what do you know, I found myself jamming "Cotton-Eyed Joe" after running through the diatonic scale a few times to orientate myself with the chromatic set-up. It'll take some getting used to. After doing that for awhile, I took a tour through the sound module patches and just went for it. Ahhhh, what a blast! I cranked through a rockin' version of Scooter Jennings' "Electric Rodeo" and decided "oh yeah - me and this boy is gonna have some fun here."

So, I'm tickled silly and, mindful that I've got a lot of cleaning around the house to do in anticipation of our new sofa that's being delivered on Thursday, I took a few pictures and promised Alberto that I'd haul him back out tonight after stopping by Guitar Center and picking up a proper strap. Below are a few photos of the new arrival and hopefully soon, I'll post the first little ditty that springs from the wood and steel.

Thanks, Doug!

(click on the pictures to enlarge)

Dulcitar: The Final Pics

To quote Walt Disney, "I'm so happy I could just bust." The Dulcitar has been completed and is currently en route from New Hampshire, scheduled to arrive Tuesday, according to the UPS website. When Doug sent the final pictures and I got that first look at the completed instrument, an electric shock ran through my body and I had to stifle a yelp of euphoric glee (euphorically?) Due to arrive on Monday is a power cord for my Digitech GNX2 effects board that I bought a few years back, played with for a couple of days and then promptly shelved when I bought the Line 6 Spyder amp. I never truly investigated the possibilities with the GNX2 and methinks that I wasn't quite ready for it back then anyway. Now that I've realized that tube amp is the only way to go in my search for tone, it seems the discontinued GNX2 is going to become my new best friend for awhile. (I have a talent for buying gear that quickly becomes obsolete.)

Below are the final pics that Doug took, which includes the placing of the frets on the neck. In the last picture, he stands with the completed treat, which he admitted was such a beauty that he was loathe to let it go.

Man, it's gonna be a long way til Tuesday.

Dulcitar Update

Earlier on the phone today, Doug said that the Dulcitar was just about ready and would be shipped probably "by Tuesday." Which means that I won't be making any plans to do anything outside of the house next weekend, just making a mental note of that at this point.

As an anniversary gift, Jae contacted Doug and made an upgrade on a component that will come in really handy. He said that it sounds incredibly good, which is enough to get me salivating all the more. Though this is the second Dulcitar ever made (making the distinction of a Doug MacCormack Dulcitar, as opposed to some of the other instruments referred to as "dulcitar"), it is the first one with dual P-bass pickups. We talked a little bit about the mix between the two single-coil pickups and the Piezo pickup that's also installed to give the solid-body instrument an acoustic setting. It was real neat talking to him, he really does love the craft of creating and the gift of performing. Doug seems as excited as I am to get her out there in front of people and I promised some recordings of early test runs, when I open her up and see what she can do. We also talked about string gauges, what he's been using and what I'm used to using, so that he can cut the nut and bridge into equi-distant optional stringing. Being a solidbody, the body can take more string pressure - he says he's using .052 gauge for the bass string. This might give me the chance to try out a violin or ukelele tuning as well. Nice.

More pictures to come, but the wait is almost over. I could just dance.

Dulcimer Days

The only electronic device that I spent any real length of time with was my tuner, while down in Key West. Joline and Angelique came for the ride. Kicking back is always a major priority when we go down there, so this time around featured more "kicking back with a dulcimer." The first time Jae and I went to Key West and during subsequent visits, I ended up playing short sets at the American Legion on Stock Island or providing pre-Thanksgiving dinner entertainment. This year, my sister-in-law Sherri asked me to play some tunes before our cookout on Wednesday for some members of the American Legion, which resulted in an invite to come play for the Legion after they finished repairs following Hurricane Wilma. The post got smacked up pretty good (pictures of a refrigerator stuck to the ceiling spring to mind), but the downstairs bar was coming along sweetly.

I've been all about the practice, trying to get my chops up for Kentucky Music Week, which is June 25th through 30th. The room's booked, the enrollment form and check sent in - it's Bardstown, Kentucky or bust!

Back, But Not Quite Yet

We left for Key West on the 27th, blew down the state in roughly seven hours and didn't look back.

Today, we returned to Orlando but we're not yet back from vacation. Hell, it's still Friday.

We had a blast; Jae and I enjoy the same things about the island, so we just flit about, as some of these pictures show. The traditional sailing on the Liberty schooner took place on May 30th, our second anniversary. The PT boat attacked us again, guns a-blazing, though we saw it coming. It always scares a few people.

Mainly we just lost ourselves in love for a week in one of our favorite places, tuned in and dropped out. We are now in the re-entry phase of "dropping back in."

Loving Jae

I married my fine and funny wife two years ago this coming weekend; we're really looking forward to revisiting the scene of the crime. We had the best wedding ever, a tropical week-long blast down in Key West with family and friends that was emblematic of our relationship. Wild, wacky, gorgeous, fun, surreal, joyful and intense. That's us in a nutshell.

She's in New York on business at the moment, so it's the cats, the dog, the snake and me, planted solidly in the studio with everything I need at arm's reach. I love you honey. But when you go - I dive headfirst into work in lieu of pining. Besides, we talk often enough during the day to make it better. The fact that we still act like newlyweds is both an endearing feature of our marriage and something that makes us infinitely hateable, to the point of scorn and derision. If we had a petrodollar for every time someone said to us "Geez, get a room", I could personally pay down the national trade deficit.

As we head back down to Key West (where we have family), it's a beautiful and amazing consideration, these past couple of years. Never could I have forseen the blessings of life at this stage in the big, crazy cycle. Never could I have imagined loving a woman the way that I love Jae - an all-encompassing, spiritually connected love that knows how to dodge sudden cracks in our Earth steps and fallen branches in our paths.

A love of dual abundance and sacrifice, of bright highs and dark lows, of balance and perpetuity. She is inspiration and salvation, little girl and all woman. She's my wife. And I really, really like her. And to paraphrase a certain musical "she lo-oves me, and I love her, and she lo-oves me for loving her and I lo-ove her for loving me and we love each other. Because neither of us got enough love in our childhoods. And that's showbiz. Kid."

Happy Anniversary, Baby!

Love,

Me

The Dulcitar Report: May 16th

If you've been reading this blog for the past few entries, you know that I'm pretty contained. It hasn't reached that "night before Christmas" kind of special where you just can't sleep and still you're just daydreaming and drooling about all of the next morning goodness. The next morning, at this point, is when the sun peeks over the edge of the world, a new pot of coffee is on the way and there's a big happy FedEx truck pulling up to our big happy house. I'll try not to scream like a little girl, but it just might happen. There's no surpressing fitz o' glee, as I like to call them. Your "F.O.G." You know it. You get it.

But right now, I'm cool as the other side of the pillow; still getting pretty excited, especially with this latest batch of pictures from Dulcitar central.

Doug says:

"While sanding/buffing we had a couple of buff throughs to the primer coat. Had to re-spray and let cure/wet sand all over again, then yet another buff through in a different spot! ARRRG! That will learn me not to follow manufacture's recommended # of coats. 3 coats? Nope- 6 coats next time!"

Look at that color, look at that shine! Look at the dolphin swimming in it all!



Holy cow! Now THAT'S hi-gloss!







That's right sexy.


Doug says:

"These LEDS are VERY bright and I was able to match the luminosity as well. They didnt have as many as I needed in stock so I had to order more. Once they are all installed I can finally glue the fingerboard on, get it fretted and start loading some pickups and electronics into this thing! This will happen fairly quickly once all the finish and structural work is behind us.- Stay tuned!"

This is really incredible, watching this new instrument come into existence, and it's been really killer to hang out virtually in the workshop with Doug. I'm pretty stoked. If you could see the grin on my face, you'd know this to be true.

Orchestrating

I've been buried this week working on a new piece; it's a simple melody that I'm exploring in a number of different variations. Using an orchestra layout, I'm actually building the music at the same time that I build the arrangement, which is something new for me. What's frustrating is that my current MIDI set-up is only registering half of the instruments, which leaves me with half an orchestra, effectively. Until I can resolve that issue, I'm pushing ahead and will post a .mid file here as soon as I finish a first draft

The Cinco De Mayo Report

Cinco De Mayo was a flippin' blast. Phillip, the bloke who was running sound for the event, did a great job with what he had, considering that forty feet back or so, every club on Wall Street had DJ music thumping out of the darkness, which made for a cosmic soup of aural hijinks. Jae and I missed Deja, which was a letdown - but Koolus was rather good, a latin rock band that mixed it up bilingually and sported a very visible throng of fans all wearing similar black t-shirts. One Drop was superb - the mix sounded sort of muddy, maybe perhaps "muddy" is too strong a word here and I'm really thinking about "oatmeal", which is not as heavy as mud, but still not as clear as crystal punch either. But they rocked to spite all that, with Roland Simmons flown in on guitar to fill a big personnel void, and I mean "flown in" figuratively. I've got stories about Roland and me on the road with Big Shirley back in '97 and they involve girls, whiskey, vomit and destroying a dressing room in South Carolina. I wouldn't kid.

Robby Copeland, ex of Pop Canon was playing drums with them as well, and there are more stories of a tour with those guys to a theme park in Alabama called Visionland and a show at a pizza joint in Montevallo. Stephen King Town. But another time, maybe.

We set up and did a quick sound check around 11 pm, "Ring-A-Ding", and noticed about 100 people start dancing near the front of the stage, which is not a terrible way to be introduced to your audience. It was a very great show, total fun every step of the way and I love playing ball with these guys up there. Our shows, in the whole seven year history of the band, having always been stretchy, turn this way and that depending on what's going on around us. So it was just totally delightful to stretch things out like "Cuckoo Tom" and "Black Indian" and sort of strut around inside of them for awhile. And by the third or fourth song, people are laying bottles of Corona and shots of Cuervo up on the stage, so there were times when we were simply grooving as I delivered the booze to the boys. We had the crowd toasting after every song in big nasty shouts of "a-yi!" and pulled Dwight Johnson up on stage to sing during "Positive Vibes", along with Lynn Finch,my lovely wife, Jae, and some guy with a cigarette who came up for a little while and then went back down into the crowd again. Take a look at the pictures and see just how insane it was. Uncle Charles, Mark and Rob all delivered the goods - there were people asking how to buy CDs from the front of the stage because we didn't have a table set-up, there was no room for a table because of all the bodies, some of whom had been partying since two that afternoon. Some handled it better than others.

It was terrific fun, all of it. And then interesting later on around 2 am when the cops do their whistle blowing "clear the area" sweep, which is one of the spookiest things I've ever experienced. The cops basically fan out and begin blowing their whistles in alternating long and short bursts, occasionally making shoving motions with their hands, some of them shouting "let's head out." Welcome to our police state.

Huge thanks to Wall Street Plaza for having us back!

Cinco De Mayo time!

After our rowdy set at their Fat Tuesday Celebration this past February, the gang at Wall Street Plaza in downtown Orlando have kindly invited Mohave back to once again headline their 8th annual Cinco De Mayo Block Party and we would have been silly burros to refuse.

We're looking forward to another great show Friday night on the outdoor stage, smack dab in the middle of downtown and sharing the bill with Deja, Koolus and One Drop. The fun is taking place all day till all night Friday and from 5-7 pm, your first shot of tequila or margarita is ON THE HOUSE! You can't beat that with a piñata stick. May 5th in Wall Street Plaza. Do it right!

Dulcitar News

The latest on the Dulcitar progress from creator Douglas MacCormack:

Its coming up on the end of May but it looks like I will need a couple more weeks. I chose to use Imron which goes on like glass but it is slow to fully cure for buffing and polishing. It us used on commercial aircraft and boats. I thank you for your patience as I know you must be jumping out of your skin by now. The end result will be worth it though. It's really coming to life in the past 2 weeks...

After a good deal of sanding (oddly enough, sanding is a "love-hate" thing for me. Must be all those kitchen cabinets I had to finish sand as a kid in the cabinet shop), it's time to seal up the wood, and apply a thin "reader" coat of black to help bring out remaining blemishes that are hard to see on bare wood. Sanding this coat will reveal high and low spots, small dents and scratches.

After those are sanded out, automotive gray primer is applied to fill up remaining defects. More sanding and fairing....

At last its time to apply the real basecoat black. Once again we go over the whole body with a fine tooth comb and take care of the tiniest of flaws. Imron, a 2 part aircraft finish, goes on like glass- thick, rich, deep, dark and delicious! 3 coats is plenty for this stuff. It wont be ready to buff for at least 6 days but it is dry enough after 3 days to handle gently.

It's out-of-control, just how psyched I am about this instrument. It really has become a defining part of this musical evolution and the attention to detail that Doug has been lavishing upon this wood is resulting in a seriously beautiful work of art. I'm proud to be the almost-owner of a truly unique instrument!

Video From The Fair

You'll need Quicktime or something that can view .mov files to see the clip below featuring me and Uncle Charles playing "Cotton-Eyed Joe" at the Central Florida Fair this past Monday:



http://www.darkstudios.com/Bing Futch_Charles Stansell_fair.mov

The fair was a ghost town Monday, with people hanging around the edges of the tent where we played. Although in this video clip, you can see a couple of fairgoers (not related) who decided to hang out closer to the stage. Thanks again to everyone who came out!

Got another Dulcitar report for later!

Joy and Terror?

The band had three great sets at the Central Florida Fair on Monday; it was a ghost town. Rumors about some kind of gang activity over the weekend had reached the ears of Mark Janssen, who was handling drum duties for the evening. Jae said some of the food vendors were complaining that it was slow over the weekend, too. Maybe from a lack of attendance. Maybe rumors. Fair crowds are always a little different than most crowds. They're there to see everything, so unless you're juggling fire, hypnotizing people or happen to be Toxic Audio, you usually get a few that hang out here and there - mostly gathered at the tables across the way, eating and listening to the music or grouped around the back of the tented seating area. The Central Florida Folk group wasn't having much better luck around the corner with their stage - numbers were down all around.

But that didn't keep us from playing like there were hundreds of people watching - we always put on a high-energy show, because the emotions are always tightly wrapped into the moments of the music. It's hard not to redline emotionally when performing "Spider Rock", "Down To Earth", "Black Indian" and "Caught" - all tunes that deal with intense flesh and blood realities. There was no holding back - though I always edit the tunes for an all ages performance - at least a little.

Everybody did a great job - reviewing the videotape, it really sounded great - and we had Gene Blankenship, our dear friend and cowboy reverend sound guy, working the sound system and stoking the speakers with Johnny Cash in between sets. Our version of "Folsom Prison Blues" went over really well, considering we'd never played it with Uncle Charles before, but he's familiar with the tune, has a great ear and has played it with other bands, so I wasn't concerned. It was the only cover we did - and it was very well-received, especially by some of the fair employees.
Signed some people up for the mailing list, ate some really greasy fair food - and had Travis Lewis come up on stage and play some guitar on "Ring-A-Ding". Travis' CD was produced by the legendary Jimmy Snow and has performed onstage at the Grand Ol' Opry. We had to bring it down quite a bit to hear him, seeing as how he played into a microphone - and it was cool to have him join us for one of our last tunes! Next time, we'll have him sing one - or do an old gospel song that he knows.

I'm happy with my performance - I'm not satisfied, if that makes any sense. Still, as much joy as performing brings, there are still those little moments of terror that I must deal with. Such a lovely balance to stand at the edge of the cliff and enjoy the view! So, continued steps towards improvement, to include monitoring my equipment output more closely on-stage. Split outputs are not always beneficial, just a mental note.

An all-around lovely time - thanks to Ellen Gordon for having us back again and congratulations on the promotion, even though we're kind of late about that.



Dulcitar Pics: Update!

Dulcitar Pics: Round Two

From Doug:

OOOOH! Color! Starting from a pure green base, sample swatches are tested on a scrap veneer. Colors are mixed in increments until the target color is reached. Dyes are mixed in 2 oz of plain water. 22g means 22 drops of green while 12b indicates how many of blue. Without clear finish, it looks rather drab but the color will darken with finish coats. I may also add a similar recipe of dyes to the first coats of finish to "warm" it up and further intensify the color. The wood has a blondish cast I dont care for so this will also get rid of that. I kept thinking of my vacation in the Keys and remembering the color of the water as we drove the Rt 1 bridge as I mixed the color.......

That's about as dreamy a connection as I would've come up with. Blessings from Key West!

3 coats of stain should do it for this phase. A light sanding between the first 2 coats will intesify the contrast.
Next a few coats of finish will be applied to help protect the wood as I finish sanding and shaping the rest of the instrument.

For those fellow dulcimer enthusiasts and luthiers who are reading this - I'm not putting every last bit of detail in the e-mail - some things have to remain magic.

A Knight Of The Round

Central Florida Folk had another one of its shows in the magnificent backyard of Mark Fodor. Deep in the heart of Orlando, this place is a little garden of eden on a resedential street; two stages, nicely landscaped. Bring on the potluck and a donation for the artists and invite the neighbors, that's how it rolls out. Last night, it was Bill and Eli of BluesGotUs and the incredible Scott Ainsley, whom Eric Clapton once called "the most important blues musician who ever lived."

Both shows were great - Bill and Eli are a fun couple and Bulldog Ben sat in on harmonica. Scott Ainsley was amazing. His presentation laced the authentic music with stories and history that made the music come even more alive. His picking was simply jaw-dropping, he sang the blues with great pain. I'm kind of embarassed that the crowd was so small; the CFF hasn't been able to successfully promote these shows in this beautiful space.

After the show came the jam, though not as usual, because everytime, it's different. Last night, we sat in a circle on the second stage, bathed in blue floodlights, and introduced songs. In the circle was Susie Cool, Bulldog Ben, a younger man from Tampa named Toby, CFF president Barry Brogan, me and Scott Ainsley. I tuned to open C, thinking it would give me more options; lucky guess. Mark Fodor made a sly song suggestion in the shape of "Flowers On The Wall" when it came my turn to toss in - so we did a pretty rowdy version of it. When it came around again, we did "Interstate 10 Blues" - and MAN did it smoke! What an honor to sit in a round of musicians like this and pass that ball. I had the four string and six-string handy (with Angelique on stand-by in the truck, in case we'd be plugging-in) but ended up going with the six-string ("Nikki") all night. With two steel resonators and two guitars, the dulcimer needs to double efforts to compete. (Two words that musicians hate to hear: turn down. Two more words that musicians hate to hear: gotta tune.)

New Fun In The Mail

My Jerry Rockwell books arrived and I am really happy about that. I ordered "Music Theory and Chord Reference For The Mountain Dulcimer", and a couple of song books of tablature, but it also came with a CD of some whacked-out electro-dulcimer experiments that are as boundary-pushing as anything out there in Dulcimerica. And that's right, I've coined the term "Dulcimerica", because it doesn't exist anywhere on the internet, and in about a week, the first times it pops up, my name will be associated with it.

God, I love the web.

And then I'm reminded of the naked pictures of me anchored somewhere in the blizzard of ones and zeros and then I rethink that whole "love" issue.

We don't live in a very bright house, in fact our cable connection is actually pretty stupid. Jae and I would very much like for the little green light second from the bottom of the modem to stop blinking slo-w-ly and stay the hell on so we can get some work done online. Right now, we're doing a bunch of work offline and then shooting it over when service is back up, which is every five minutes with breaks of twenty. Yeah. It's like that.

And I'm typing with a handicapped pinky, crushed by another cruel piece of electrician's hardware. In the past three weeks, I've fractured my right big toe, sprained my left wrist and then jammed my right pinky earlier today; both digits are swollen but the wrist is making a comeback. So, playing dulcimer right now has been an exercise in sheer passion. It's like, "what would you do for the revolution?"

"I'd practice injured!"

The First Of April.mp3

While diving into the music this past weekend, I decided to write some backing tracks for one of the MacJams.com guys, Leon Aguilar, to sing over. Leon's an up and coming writer/performer and I really like his style - so I cooked up "The First Of April."

Most of the sounds are dulcimer, including the long sustained, synthesizer-type notes that were created by using the EBow. The drums are edited loops, the bass is some edited loopage and some real-time input. The horns and strings at the end are sounds from my Roland Fantom keyboard and there are a couple of little effects here and there. It sounds, to me, a little like a David Bowie song - which is kinda cool. The odd song structure struck me as being "right" - with a big rocking bridge in place of a second verse and a large breakdown section with not a lot of drums. I'm eager to see what Leon comes up with - in the meantime, I've got some of my own ideas and designs about how this may translate.

Bing Futch - The First Of April.mp3

First Dulcitar Pics

As you can see in these pictures, the Dulcitar is starting to emerge from raw materials. The basic shape has been cut and the beginning stages of texture-placement have begun.

Vroom, vroom...

For the longest time, I just could NOT get this piece of sheet music printed out. It's been finished for a while, but there was some kind of error that was proving to be impossible - until today. So, here is another original tune ready for download in .pdf format:

This Road This Moment (.pdf)

This is the music for the final track on clear blue trickling. Right now, I've been notating the music into Sibelius and then exporting it to graphic form, dumping it into Adobe InDesign and then exporting it as a .pdf file. When it works. It's quite a process and I know there are easier ways - I'm just not sure what they are, besides TablEdit - which I'm working on getting. I'm pretty sure that the version that actually saves is a donation of some sort, and funds are kind of tied up and precious currently. So, what I've got to use is free - and that works for the time being, right?

EBow ROCKS!

Wow, this thing is pretty nifty! Now granted, it's made for guitars, even down to the string-spacing, so I knew that applying it to a dulcimer was going to be tricky - but within a half-hour or so, I was getting the most incredible sounds, from soft, woodwind-type hoots to mad fiddling action ala Beethoven. It requires a very delicate touch, and it sure is taking some getting used to - but a whole new avenue of sound has just been opened up to me - and hopefully, by the time the Dulcitar arrives, I'll have it down enough to really leap in with both feet. I'll upload some sound samples as soon as I've got something cool put together. Giddy fun! And speaking of the Dulcitar...

Dulcitar Update



Doug writes that the veneer for the topside will be a little different, as you can see to the right, it's "a wide deep curl rather than a quilt. Bookmatched down the center- sweet!" He also reports that "As of today, The body is cut out, sanded and top is veneered..starting to look like a dulcitar! Meanwhile, control/pickup cavities need to be routed and 'handle' cut out. That will keep me busy for a day or two. Then Dolphy is carefully shaped and inlayed into top. After first sanding, sealer is hand painted onto Dolphy but not wood- to protect the pearl from being stained. Corner of back and sides will be rounded off with half round bit, sanded and sprayed. The top/sides use a smaller bit and will have to wait until after staining and application of color- black for the back, turquoise for the top. Top and back are colored and sealed for protection from the router base from scratching the top. The results are a nice clean line all around needing little or no touchup. The final finish coats are then applied."

"Dolphy" refers to the mother-of-pearl dolphin that he's going to inlay into the top for me. This is truly going to be a one-of-a-kind instrument!

What really made my eyes pop is his description of how he's going to get the effect that's pictured here on this guitar. "To bring out the contrast in the grain, I will first stain the wood after light sanding using my finger tips, leaving the ripples. The a coat of sealer is then applied. Next the tops of the 'hills' are sanded off using a flat block, leaving the 'valleys' still sealed. Several more coats of stain are applied to the hills, making them darker than the valleys and so increasing the contrast. The pic below is what I'm shooting for... six parts emerald green to one part deep blue comes pretty close. Maybe a drop of yellow?"

She's gonna be one dreamy-looking axe!

Mucking Around

Dulcitar Progress Report

Doug writes that "this is the veneer I have ordered for a top laminate. The body wood has also been purchased. I hope to start cutting wood next week." I'm like a little kid on Christmas Eve. Already. A couple of days later, "Lexan template made, maple body blank sections laid out, rough shaped on band saw.
Next- body halves glued up and clamped today......expect veneer to arrive today or tomorrow."

There's a whole month of this left, I don't know that I can take it.

New Toy...Er, Technology

I went and picked up an EBow from Guitar Center yesterday. It's a little handheld device that produces an energy field that vibrates and sustains your guitar string; they call it Direct String Synthesis. I just call it Fun As All Get-Out. In the little brochure that comes with it (it's wrapped in a little velvet bag, like a bottle of Crown Royal), among the "fun things to do with an EBow" listed are "use with a slide", "violin-like bowing strokes" and "annoy the neighbors."

Which I'm planning to go do, right now.

Next?

The latest news is this: we're not going to Curacao. Sure, they still want us to play, but the terms of agreement have been changed. Originally, the Festival Curacao organizers were paying for each band's round trip airfare, hotel rooms for the week, issuing a per diem for meals and sending everyone home with a percentage of American ticket sales. Just recently, however, the organizers put out the word that they were hoping bands could cover their own transportation, room and board. Seeing as how we're all poor people, we simply couldn't rise to this particular occasion - so we sent along our regrets in not being able to attend.

Yeah, it's a bummer - I was looking forward to the trip if ever-so-slightly, because I always keep it in the back of my head that nothing's assured until you're there on the day of show going "wow, we're here." Usually.

But no frets and worries - those play dates would've fallen on Jae and I's second wedding anniversary, so this year, we'll continue our tradition of celebrating in Key West, where we were married.

I just put a deposit down on my Dulcitar and I'm super-stoked. It'll be the first production model made after the prototype, which is pictured here, and Doug's doing some crazy-great customizations on it, including:

4 string design Chromatic scale
Color- transparent turquoise/blue burst, gloss top, flat black back/sides, “routed binding”
Finish type- 2 part Dupont or Imron
Custom inlay- dolphin as specified, left/upper bout
LED Fret markers- green/blue 12th fret
Wood- plain maple
Fingerboard- rosewood
Tuners- chrome Goto mini buttons
Custom bone nut- Standard cut slots(doubled bass strings, 2 melody strings with extra slots for equidistant spacing
Electronics- 2 p-bass pickups with piezo saddle/bridge

It's gonna be sexy. As production pictures are available, I'll post them here - but suffice it to say that I'm drooling over mid-April, which is around about when I can expect this baby to be shipped! I told Doug if I really liked it, I'd order another one, this time with a traditional dulcimer fretboard (well, with 6+ and 3+ frets).

Patrick McKinney, who was the luthier behind creating Angelique out of a Cripple Creek acoustic kit, is ready to go for bout number two, during which we're going to fashion a solid-body hot-rod of a dulcimer with traditional fretboard to be played in the original style. Based on his suggestion, we're going to make it a real speciality of an instrument and offer up a few for sale online - a signature dulcimer. We're in the design phase now.

Man, 5:30 a.m. comes quickly - heigh-ho, heigh-ho, and all that fiddle-jazz!