16 August 2026, 18:18
article by Rattlebrained
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Just stumbled on an interesting podcast from 2025 on KUAF.com about the life of Cedell Davis; who I love the music of, and so wanted to share:
www.kuaf.com/show/ozarks-at-large/2025-08-18/the-life-legacy-of-arkansas-blues-legend-cedell-davis
9 March 2026, 15:27
article by Rattlebrained
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– In January I received an unexpected message titled “Thumb Thumper” :
I made a thumb thumper out of a scrap of UHMW—ultra high molecular weight material. It is a very dense piece teflon plastic.
I’m not well enough versed in plastics to say much more than that, but it delivers one hell of a whack to my washboard. I hit upon the idea because I was upset about the sound of a thimble striking the cowbell. It was a “clink” not a “dong”.
I bough a pair of mallets and experimented with those. They have a lovely fat sound, but…
28 January 2019, 12:52
article by Rattlebrained
2 comments.
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.
4 October 2018, 16:43
article by Rattlebrained
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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
4 July 2018, 16:37
article by Rattlebrained
8 comments.
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
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
1 July 2018, 18:22
article by Rattlebrained
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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.
28 June 2018, 15:41
article by Rattlebrained
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