Rattlebrained

Once, in the mid 90’s (?) while traveling, I bought a felt tipped “brush pen” and was really disappointed with it; probably because I had big expectations of what an item like that should be like. A few years later I stumbled on a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and was both enchanted and somewhat disappointed. If I remember right it had a few ink flow issues, or at least I thought it did, and it wasn’t that great on some of the watercolor papers I was carrying around at the time.

That said, a quick glance at some old sketch books shows that in the early 2000’s I went from mostly sketching with a pencil, to mostly sketching with a brush pen.

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Some time ago I stuck some images on “Ello” (a social network) but as hardly any on my friends gave this artist, creator network a try – and as all these sites all are very time consuming – I pretty much gave up on it; besides an occasional visit.
Sadly, as of July 2023, the Ello social network is no longer available.

Still, it was over there that I first noticed

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It seems that when I remade the Jazz Up Your Washboard page, I removed the info on thimbles in an attempt at better organization, and then promptly forgot to do something with it. Sorry about that! Better late than never… :P

Best keep them on your fingers but how?

Some folks don’t seem to have a problem keeping the thimbles on their fingers, while other do. I suppose it has to do with finger shape and size as well as

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Two years ago I was able to set up my drums in the corner of a friend’s music space; which has been great. Amazing how being able to play loud without bothering anyone really changes the game! I practice daily, an activity that could be resumed as playing stuff (rudiments, exercises.. ) with a metronome, and playing along with the songs the bands I play with perform.

I used an Art USB Dual Pre computer interface to power some cheep overhead mics and a PW-1 Personal Wedge to feed my in-ear headphones. It has a mini jack input which makes it easy to add the signal from either a mp3 player for the songs, or an old 7” tablet with a metronome app, to the headphone mix.

However, last fall for an unrelated reason I needed a tablet with a more recent version of android.

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4 or so years ago I stumbled on a video of someone blowing into a Aztec or Maya “Death” Whistle and thought: “Wow, that’s pretty cool, would be fun to have one”… So I searched the web, found a few websites on Aztec whistles and archeology, but didn’t see any you could buy. I remember telling a friend who goes occasionally to Mexico about them and to pick one up if ever… Time went by, as it has a way of doing, and slowly they moved from drawer to drawer towards the back of my mind.

Then a couple of months ago I saw a group of clay whistles and flutes at my local music store,

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Evening thunderstorms have been so common in the last weeks that it was pretty awesome that the Blues Rules festival happened “between the drops”, as they say in French. In fact it was sunny and surprisingly warm, the gods must have turned an approving eye!

There are enough photographers covering the scene theses days and my bag being heavy enough as it is, I left the camera at home and hoped to make a few sketches instead. And for better or worse that’s what I did…

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