Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

Last night we worked on Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze, two original jigs.

The title Irksome Girl comes from one of those band name generator websites. We decided it didn’t work for us as a band name — it doesn’t exactly fit our “kind of Celtic” style. But it does fit for a description of our band’s sole female.

Guess who’s the most picky, the most demanding, the most likely to be in a foul mood, the most sensitive, the most whiny, most likely to send too many, too-long emails? Fortunately we all (seem to) tolerate my rough edges and still manage to get along quite well and enjoy one another.

Anyway, since we weren’t going to use the title for a band name, I figured I’d at least use it for a tune title.

Irksome Girl is in Am for the A part. There’s some walking bass stuff, but essentially the A part centers on that Am chord. In the B part, the key changes to A mixolydian, and the chord progression rocks back and forth between A and G or Em.

We start with four A parts, first just dulcimer and guitar, then adding in the fiddle. The third time through, we do a sort of re-intro, with fiddle and guitar doing two A parts and then me building in a rhythmic bass thing for two more A parts, leading nicely into the B part.

Midnight Maze might be the first tune I wrote here in Ithaca. There was a community-wide reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein going on, which I thought was a cool thing to do. The introduction to the book talks about its origins in a contest, and how Mary’s idea came to her in a dream.

I think dreams are fascinating, with their weird yet familiar landscapes, people, and events, juxtaposed and jumbled together. Midnight Maze nods to Mary Shelley and to the world of dreams.

It’s in Bm, and I tried to write a melody full of jumps and turns and shifts. We start with a single guitar chord and a long low B fiddle drone while dulcimer plays melody, then the guitar returns in the second A part and the fiddle joins the melody in the B part. Second time through I drop an octave, and the last time we repeat the second-to-last phrase to make a kind of tag ending.

It’s a difficult medley, especially for me. Playing the bare melodies is a bit awkward, and I’m also trying to throw in some walking bass notes in Irksome. We also had to decide between guitar strumming all the time, or fingerpicking some parts and strumming others. We like the fingerpicking, but there’s not enough time to grab a pick for strumming, so if he fingerpicks, he’s got to strum without a pick.

I’ve got seven full takes plus two partials; I hope there’s enough good material in them to edit together a good version of the medley. If not, it’s still useful development and practice.

I have three unresolved issues with the layout — so far.

One is that there are no paragraph breaks, at least none that look like <p> breaks usually do, with a line of space before the new paragraph. Why is this happening? I am guessing it is in the CSS somewhere, but I’m not sure what to look for. Any suggestions?

Second is even more puzzling. On the front page, in Firefox and in Safari, the sidebar box is higher than the content box. In IE they’re even. What’s wrong there? I want them to be even everywhere. And in Firefox, they’re only uneven on the front page.

Third, the archive pages only show excerpts from each post. I’d like to find the code for that so I can determine how long the excerpt should be, and I’d also like to make the “More[…]” into a working link with the text “[Read more] ”

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Today I ran through the set list for my anniversary concert, including what introductions and other talking I want to do. It’s an hour and forty-five minutes long, which is about fifteen minutes longer than I’d like — I was tired before I was done, and my guests will be sitting on a persian rug or in hard metal chairs.

I’ll have to think about what I can cut short — particularly talking — and maybe plan a short break in the middle. I don’t really want to cut out any tunes… I’m geeky enough to have planned five sets of five tunes for this fifth anniversary, and I don’t really want to change that.

Woo-hoo! I found a helpful guide to dissecting WordPress themes at UrbanGiraffe, John Godley, who even answers questions!

Obviously I still have work to do, but progress continues.

Sort of in over my head, trying to customize this template. I’m making progress with the background image, fonts, and main colors, but yikes, other details are overwhelming. For example, I want the body of each page to stay put — to clear the paisley border on the left (which I remember I had to remove for users of older IE… which reminds me I need to be testing all this to make sure there’s no problems for older browsers), and for the left margin not to move when someone changes the size of the window. But I still want the width to be collapsible, to avoid those annoying horizontal scrollbars. I’m not sure quite how to go about doing this. I almost wonder if I’d be better of building a template from scratch — I might understand it better than just experimental tweaking of an existing template.

I also don’t know yet whether I want to revise my whole site with WordPress (which offers static “Pages” as well as blog posts) or just keep existing static pages as is. That may affect how I customize the template — if I revise the whole site, I might change things more, but if I keep existing pages, I want the blog to more or less match.

And normally when I link to pages within my site, I don’t have to spell out the whole url, but just a slash and the desired page’s name. But since this blog thing is in a separate directory, I don’t know how to escape that directory without just typing out entire urls. And yet I don’t like the idea of having all the WordPress stuff in my main directory.

And…

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Not to mention I need to keep practicing for the upcoming anniversary concert and other events, and the rest of non-online life.