Thanks to Ned for turning me on to the following (new to me) Built to Spill video for the song Conventional Wisdom from their 2006 You in Reverse album. Incredibly groovy guitar soundscapes are complimented by an awesome Jousting presentation with American Jousting Alliance’s founder James Zoppe, the Red Knight and the band.
You may not be able to get that guitar in tune because it isn’t possible. Most of us don’t notice anyway, but it’s comforting to know that you’re not necessarily incompetent if you can’t ever seem to get your guitar to play perfectly in tune in every key - since it can’t really be done.
Let me start off by saying that No Guitar Will Play Perfectly In Tune EVER. The tempered system of tuning upon which guitar fret placement relies on is imperfect, but it’s the best we can do. The system was designed by J.S. Bach in 1717 and first demonstrated on his work The Well Tempered Clavier. Before Bach’s tempered tuning, fixed pitch instruments (keyboards, instruments with frets, etc.) were designed to play in one key at a time. If you needed to play in a different key, you’d use a different instrument or completely retune the one you had. Bach’s system redesigned the relationship between all of the notes so that the octaves in all keys would be an octave apart. In order for this to work, all of the notes in between the octaves had to be slightly out of tune. For folks with good ears, nothing played on a guitar or piano really sounds in tune. - Scott Freilich, Top Shelf Music (hyperlinks are mine)
I was lucky enough to hook up with a bunch of friends to see the Pogues play Roseland on St. Patty’s day! I skipped out of work a bit early, caught the train in to Penn, took the C up two stops to 50th St. and hiked up the two blocks to 52nd street. Tim was already in with Sport and Cate who had gone in early for the parade and were just getting the kids and grandparents back on a train out east when I arrived, so I just hung out on line and talked to some cool people from New Brunswick about bands we liked until they could get down to meet me.
This is a static version of a dynamic document kept on Google Docs, which is shared with several friends to view and collaborate on over time. The most recent version of the page may be found here. This is basically a list of bands I want to check out, have only begun to investigate, or think are worth sharing - I find new bands by talking to friends, listening to the local college and independent radio stations, or some of several Celtic Folk music podcasts, or internet radio stations.
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A story on TechCrunch notes that Yahoo has released some code for their new browser based flash media player. While I don’t see a personal need to use their player when there are already so many perfectly good flash media players available, I can’t help but try it out. If it’s easier than installing the typical player or fiddling with a nifty module in blog software, maybe people will post more music! In fact, maybe I’ll start a real podcast one of these days…
I’ve linked a couple instrumental ditties below that I recorded on my Guitar Lute [image page] that were thrown up here on my private podcast recently. They aren’t perfect, but they were done 
Spagnoletta
Minuet in Em
You should see a little grey player icon next to each mp3 link if you want to try the player. Otherwise, you can just click the direct link. [update: It doesn't seem to work in Opera, though is OK in Firefox, Safari, and IE]
