Rattlebrained

– 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…

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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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