It's been awhile since I've been on Blogger... forgot my password... and also where I had written it down.  But all's well now.

Paraclete has been mysteriously silent lately, our only recent public performance coming at the BIMA meeting.  Fortunately, a portion of it was videotaped.  Here we are playing Pocketbell, sans the classical guitar part. 



So what have we been doing all this time?  We have a ton of jazz standards that we added to our already-long list, and we've been busy learning and arranging the music, Paraclete style.

But spring is definitely here, and the weather keeps getting warmer.  Hopefully we'll start getting some Saturdays that are warm and dry enough to go play down at the Bellingham Farmer's Market on Railroad Avenue.

Paraclete Live!

Reminder:

Paraclete live @ The Harborside Bistro in the Bellwether Hotel
5-8pm

Now, time to go tune up fiddle and practice...

Strings, guitars, and a new gig

I've been playing a lot of classical guitar lately.  That's in addition to whatever I happen to be learning on uke.  My Ramirez guitar has been strung with Thomastik ropecores for the last year or so, but as much as I love those strings for folk and jazz playing, they are less suited to the more formal classical stuff.  I restrung it last week with Savarez red cards.. wound G and B.  I really like the sound.  Unlike plain nylon strings, the plastic-wound G and B have a brighter treble and more sustain.... less of that unfortunate tubbiness, particularly common to the G string.

But of course now that I have just restrung, Paraclete has landed a 3-hour gig at the Harborside Bistro for Friday, March 12 from 5-8pm.  We will probably mic the guitar anyway, as I haven't gotten a pickup ordered yet.  I don't do a lot on guitar for our sets anyway... mostly fiddle.  We are very excited and hope that this gig will lead to more playing opportunities and maybe something steady.

As for my last post about D tuning on the uke, I gave that up after a couple hours.  It was amusing at first and then it got annoying.  So I am happily back to C tuning.  I've been trying to learn more jazz chords and getting completely frustrated with my inability to learn it all faster.  Slow and steady, I have to remind myself.  Of course, I should spend less time obsessing over jazz uke chords and more time practicing my double stops on violin.

And speaking of strings and ukes, I had clear Worth strings on the tenor Kala archtop uke, but I just put Aquilas on it over the weekend.  I still prefer Aquilas to Worths.  I know some people really love the Worth strings, but I'm just not seeing or hearing it...  might try classical guitar strings one of these days.  Honestly, one could spend a lot of time and money trying to find the perfect strings for guitar or uke.  I don't have a strong committment to anything particular yet.  That said, I've always used Thomastik Dominants on my violin.  I know there are a bunch of other good strings out there, but I've no particular interest in experimenting with violin strings... probably because they are soooo expensive.

D tuning on a soprano ukulele

I've been experimenting today with D tuning... (not detuning)  on my soprano ukulele.  It is actually a whole step up from the more common C tuning.  I don't think I'd ever use the tuning on tenor, but it sounds very sweet and bright on the soprano.  It used to be a lot more common... perhaps that was during the last uke boom in the early 20th Century.  But if I keep playing with other ukers, I'm going to have to either relearn chords or drop back to C.  Time will tell. 

On a different note, Paraclete has finally scraped together packets for distribution to restaurants, clubs, coffee shops, etc.  Yeah, I know it took a long time.  We've been preoccupied with the complications of life.  So what's in that packet?  A nice 8x8 glossy photo montage of Jimi and me with a glimpse of our arsenal in the backdrop; a cd sampling of music from a home recorded practice session, a list of songs that we play, and a short bio. 

I hope we will be performing somewhere soon.

Pocket Bell

Branching out

Currently, Jimi and I are recording samples to go in a packet that we can distribute to clubs, restaurants, cafes, and whatnot.  The goal is to get some gigs going again.  We started out at the Bellingham Farmer's Market during the summer of 2009... no wait, actually our first public performance was the Fall of 2008, when we did a few tunes with Johnny Waco and the Cainthardlyplayboys at the Green Frog.

Brings back some memories.... let me think.. it was "Put Another Log on the Fire", "Act Naturally", and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  Crowd seemed to enjoy it enough.  I had only been playing fiddle for two months or so at that point.  I was classically trained on the violin since age 6, but I stopped playing in 1994.  Jimi convinced me to start playing again.  Needless to say, I sound a LOT better now than I did in 2008!

My newest project is learning to play ukulele.  I bought Jimi a custom Hawaiian-made tenor uke for Christmas.  Somehow, during the many months when I was researching ukes and trying to find just the right one, I got completely hooked.  But I'll save that story for later. 

Welcome to the world of Paraclete.  Maybe I can even get Jimi to post once in awhile....