Those of you who celebrate today, I give you my black ol' heart!

Earlier this evening I met up with the hubby of the nice lady who bought my National ukulele and traded it—the ukulele, that is—for an envelope of cash. The guy was just as nice as his wife, sitting patiently sipping a beer whilst I chewed his ear off for an hour or so. And when I looked in the envelope after he'd left, he'd overpaid by $10. Thanks, B! You're a gentleman and a scholar.

But what the hell! I like you anyways... ;-)

Next was a visit to 7-11 where I paid way too much for a box of my favorite cheap stogies. That's the last time 7-11. You charged me half-again what I'd have paid at the second cheapest place I buy them. And not even a reach around.

But for the last couple hours I've been sitting here, occasionally looking at the web but mostly brushing up on one of the tunes I co-wrote with Thadd in preparation for my next video.

Why is it so hard to remember one's own tunes?

The FA is off visiting with one of her friends. The cats are behaving themselves. (Or at least misbehaving quietly.) And it suddenly struck me.

I'm pretty happy.

Happiness is a good thing, but often so fleeting that one tends to miss it in all the kerfluffle of daily life. I'm glad I was aware enough to notice. For once.

It's all too easy to bitch and kvetch. But all that bitching and kvetching can sometimes drown out the happy. Happiness is mostly quiet, bitching tends to be at a higher volume.

Now I'll go back to my ukulele, because the song still needs more work before it's into muscle memory (I rarely perform it live... but that's going to change).

And I'll be happy doing it.

The Ukulele Has Been Sold

I've been considering selling my National for some time now. I find that I'm playing one or the other of my wooden ones quite a bit and haven't even taken the reso out of the case for months until I took the pictures below. Three things before we get into it.

First: I'll do most of the descriptive writing below the pics.
Second: As usual, clicking on the pics brings them up in a popup window in a larger size. Plus, it's a clickable slideshow so you can see all of them without closing and reopening the popup.
Third: When it sells I'll edit this post with a big "sold" up here near the top AND I'll close down the special email address (see the text below all the pictures).

The side view pretty clearly shows how low and even the action is.

The ukulele arrived with the strings tied onto that little black "tailpiece" in the classical guitar style. I found that the knots were chewing the heck out of my forearm when I was playing it. The little tunnels you run the strings through are too large to hold a normal end knot, so I slid glass beads onto the strings and it's been working fine ever since. You may not have that problem, but nothing has been changed on the uke so you can just toss the beads (unless beadwork is another of your hobbies!) and go back to the classical tie.

The ukulele is the "U.S. Steel" model (i.e. it's a steel body rather than brass) and is the soprano size. To the best of my knowledge National is no longer making the sopranos. It's at the high end of the soprano scale length though, so you folks that prefer concerts may find it easier than most sopranos.

It has the powder finish in a dark blue. Oddly enough, when I bought it (used) I didn't think to ask about the color. It appeared black in the photos I saw. It was a moderate disappointment but I got over that quickly when I started to play it! :-)

It could stand having a new set of strings put on it. It has Aquila NylGuts in the concert gauge right now. It came with the weird National "nylon wound on nylon" strings. They were pretty hard to play and, furthermore, like all wound strings they wore out fast. In fact, the only string I've broken in the 10 or so years I've been seriously playing the ukulele was on the National.

On a related note, the fingerboard could use a cleaning. This is something I only do when I change strings and, since I haven't played it in a long while, the string change has taken a back seat on the ol' priority list.

If you have any questions about the ukulele you can either post them in the comments or email them to me via reso@howlinhobbit.com. Also use that address if you wish to buy it.

So how much is it?

Here's the deal. I have set up my PayPal account for small payments, so I could sell single mp3 downloads and not lose most of the price to fees. The fee structure is set up so that below $12 or so it's a better deal than the "normal" fees. Up to about $20 the difference isn't too bad. Alas, once you get into really large amounts, it chews the heck out of the money. So I'm setting two prices for the National.

If you're local to me (somewhere near enough that you can pop into Seattle with little problem) and you can pay cash, I'll meet up with you and the price is $650. If I recall correctly (and please to correct me if I'm wrong) they sold for somewhere north of $800 new, so I think this is fair. 

If you have to pay via PayPal, and are in the continental US, I want $750 for it. This will cover the big chunk eaten for fees and I'll take shipping out of it as well.

If you're outside the continental US I may have to ask a bit more if the shipping is too steep. If it's just a little more than the US shipping prices, I can stay with the $750.

I not taking checks or money orders as my bank tends to hold larger checks for 10 days so they can ride the float and jack more money out of it so it has "time to clear." I am outta cash and into the nasty busking season and don't want to wait extra long for the money.

Again, any questions can either go in the comments or to the email addy above. Offers to buy should only go to the email addy.

Thanks for checking it out!

After a two and a half month gap, I finally got around to posting a new video today. Since this is a cover of a tune written by my friend Jim Nason, there'll be no songsheet, but it's basically a 3-chord wonder (I, IV & V) with an occasional II chord thrown in. I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out if you want to play it.

Jim—known around these parts as "The Emergency Folksinger"—writes fabulous tunes and has given me permission to use 'em as I see fit, as long as it's not for profit. I'll pay him if I release a cover on a CD I sell or something. I'll probably do a video of one of his other tunes that has a prominent position in my repertoire one of these days.

I've been doing a lot of studying on audio recording techniques and the wonderful Wilfried Welti has sent me tons of advice on video making. I think they both show in this video.

As far as audio goes, I recorded the audio for my latest videos on my Zoom H2. It simply does better audio than the cameras. This time I was able to load it up on my computer and EQ it quite nicely before syncing it up with the video.

There are two things from Wilfrid's emails that I used in this vid. First, and most important, he talked to me about the "white balance" setting on the camera(s) and how important it was to set them. Turns out it's easy-peasy on my cameras, and quick as well. What it did for me is make both camera's footage match up a lot closer in general lighting, even though one was about 6 feet away and the other was about 3 feet away (and zoomed in to boot!). That saved me from trying—with my extremely limited skills—to adjust the brightness/contrast of one to match the other. Yay!

Here's a good tutorial on white balance and Wikipedia has some good info as well.

The other thing he'd mentioned was that the background in a lot of my videos was kind of distracting. These are often shot in my bedroom, whose walls are painted so it looks like you're inside a giant computer. So I faked up a backdrop using a rather disreputable looking three-fold screen belonging to our housemate and a nice, sort of greyish-blue sheet. This led to the only point about the video that I'm really dissatisfied with. I'd tried (and thought I'd succeeded) in aiming both cameras so that all they showed was me and the sheet. After 8 (eight!) takes I finally got one I was happy with and loaded it onto the ol' Mac. Turns out the long view camera was getting the edge of the backdrop and some of the wall behind it.

Grrrr! Damn tiny screens on the cameras and aging eyeballs in my noggin!

I decided eight is enough (ahem) and just rolled with it. I'll know to triple check for that in my next video.

I think I've blathered on long enough. Here's the video:

For An Old Man

If you like it, please pop over to YouTube and click the "like" button and/or share it around with your Twitterverse, your Facebook gang, your legions of blog readers, etc. I have this little personal fantasy™ wherein I have a vid that crosses 1000 views in a week or so, rather than several months (or never!). You can do a lot to make a creaky old Hobbit's dream come true.

Of course, you're welcome to leave a comment here should you choose! Even if you don't like it.