| Pickin' Parties | Kaleponi |
When I was composing the invitations for this year's get together I started off calling it "Guitar Fandango 2012" and I was pretty happy with that title. But then I remembered the late great Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten, composer of "Freight Train." Her name for the classic parlor guitar piece "Spanish Fandango" was "Spanish Flangdang" and I couldn't resist changing to her version. I'm so taken with the name that I plan to use "Guitar Flangdang" for all future gatherings.
As always, these events are more about the people and the music than the guitars, so I missed quite a few beautiful instruments in my pictures, but I hope that I captured a photo of nearly everyone who attended. This year we added a new feature that I'm pretty excited about, the Flangdang Video Booth, so easy even a guitar player can do it! I used my Zoom Q3HD as the video and audio recorder, but I connected a pair of Audio Technica AT3035 mics to an M-Audio DMP3 preamp and from there into the Zoom. With this rig all connected, the instructions were simple indeed: press the red button, sit on the stool, play/sing, press the red button. Well, I thought it would be easy enough that even a guitar player could do it, but that may have been a bit optimistic. Still, we wound up with a nice collection of clips featuring a handful of the fine players and beautiful instruments present. I trimmed and titled the clips and gave the audio a bit of extra volume, then posted the result on my Homebrewed Music YouTube channel. I created a playlist to collect them all for your viewing convenience.
The first guests arrived well ahead of the party. Our old rock'n'roll buddy, Peter Fraser, showed up several days before, while Kathy Wingert and Gretchen Wenner came a day ahead. Gretchen has a history of bringing along fascinating instruments, this year it was a little National tenor `ukulele koa bodied resonator.
When 2 PM came around we had beer and soft drinks on ice, munchies on the table, and guests coming in the door. Mike Nepper was among the first to arrive and he brought along quite a guitar.
We have a number of guests who are not guitar players, although most of them are related in some way.
Ahh, here's hubby on the left. There were several Yamamoto guitars being passed around in a variety of configurations. Tsuneyuki is known for stretching boundaries, with large jumbo bodies featuring wedge construction, multiscale multistring instruments, and the slanted neck joint of the Talus model in the previous picture, still there are plenty of us who enjoy his more tradition OMY model.
Here's another pair of non-pickers. Lynn on the right created the space for parties like this with her vision of a comfort zone for friends to gather. She also put together all the healthy snacks for the party - somehow my cooking rarely falls into that category.
We get a lot of guitars at these events, it's an exception when someone shows up with only one case. Matt Sarad came prepared with this multi-guitar stand that safely held a quartet of instruments.
| Pickin' Parties | Kaleponi |