The oldtime banjo blog from Kiel

You know why children don´t go to the house of a bluegrass banjo player on Halloween? They are afraid he would give them a roll. And why don´t they visit the frailer? He could drop his thumb.

Shortly before we traveled to Crete, I came over this lovely song, maybe of Irish origin. I´ve heard it in 3/4 and in 4/4 too. I prefer 3/4, so it sounds more sad to me ;-) I tried to play it very softly on the banjo. Didn´t imagine how hard this can be. I would be happy if some of you transcontinental guys could join in - and make the song even more sad ;-) The chord progression is G D7 G G (melody note on first string, 5th fret, double thumbing with 5th string) D7 D C G D7 G Capoed up two frets (5th string too). Take out your Kleenex: Coast of Malabar .

Holiday´s over :-((( We were in Paleochora, Crete, and it was wonderful as ever. The banjo surely is no genuine instrument there. But the idea of meeting Yannis there - "the headless frailer" from Patrick´s blog - pushed me to take my banjo to Greece. Yannis is a great guy and we had two jams there. The second one until after midnight :-) (Yanni: Our neighbours did talk to us the next day, so it wasn´t too bad for them, I think). We even made some videos. Yannis posted them to youtube. You may have seen "Wolfgang and Julia" at Patrick´s blog . We also did "Worried Man Blues" but had to accelerate speed in the end of the song as our recording staff gave us signals, that the camera will not have enough recording space (or was it a problem with the batteries?) :-) Anyway: a little raki helped us to finish nearly in time. Here is "Worried Bellies", performed by the "Pot Bellies Band" following the greek tradition of headless frailing: Thank...

Well, not really on the "road", but I´ll post when I´m back.

... ist leider sehr gefährdet. Der Raum im Flintbeker Bahnhof steht nicht mehr zur Verfügung. Wir müssen uns deshalb dringend nach einem anderen Ort umsehen. Wenn jemand eine Idee hat, bitte gleich an mich mailen. Ich hör mich natürlich auch um, aber es ist nicht so einfach ... :-( Jetzt kommen ja erst mal die Ferien, aber im November sollten wir uns doch wieder treffen, oder?

I must admit that my recording of the "Irish Washerwoman Jig" was of bad quality. The room wasn´t ok for recording I´m afraid. But Pat W. ("from the other side of the Chessapeake Bay") ran the bad file through a special programm and now we can hear that it´s guitars what they are playing ;-)

Got some good advice from my "transcontinental friends". Amongst those were repeately: Don´t format the SD-card with the computer, only use the built-in option in the H2. Good to know, but I didn´t use windows for formatting. So this wasn´t the fault. I returned the SD-card (it was a "Sandisk") to the shop and bought another one (now its a 2GB "Formel1"). And everything is ok. So I can use the H2 again. The card must have had a bug.