A little relaxation…

After yet another long night at work, I came home ready for some relaxation.

At my birthday party, I got to talking with one of our QA guys, Wylie.  He is a rather accomplished acoustic guitar player and I found out that he also plays mandolin and banjo.  I told him I had a banjo that I inherited from my aunt, and I didn’t know how to tune it and that was all the prompting he needed to help me out with that.  He then proceeded to shred on the thing (or whatever the banjo equivalent of shredding is) and it really made me miss my aunt at that moment.

So I was working today, and I put on my iPod and up came a song by Modest Mouse that featured a prominent banjo track.  It is very audible during the song, and I quickly found out it was played on a four string banjo just like mine.  So after some digging, I found some tablature and brought it home with me.

Luckily, this song also had the tuning listed, so I got my guitar tuner out and tuned that thing up and started to practice.  It felt good to actually use the thing, I was afraid it was going to sit in our spare bedroom and remain unplayed but now I have something I can work on and get some use out of it!