Returned to New Orleans today following some business travel and some personal time with my family in Virginia.

Our plane landed mid-day so when we arrived back at the house work was in full swing. Mike and Rick were installing the wall tile in the downstairs bathroom.

By the end of the day a good bit of the tile was up. Seeing this makes it seem like the project will one day be completed.

Needing to stay busy while the guys were here working, K and I decided to work on getting the kitchen into some sort of functional state. While I was traveling, Ben and Rob stopped by and helped K move the refrigerator into the kitchen — no small feat involving removal of handles and doors — and hook up the Chambers stove. Today I worked on painting some shelves and K figured out how to turn four random pieces of furniture into a kitchen. I think she did a great job. I am thinking of this as Kitchen 1.0 — knowing that we will be iterating as we discover what works and what needs improvement.

No heavy lifting tonight though. We are relaxing. K is catching up on some PBS and I am working on version 1.1 of the music room since two of my tables just migrated down to the kitchen this afternoon. The good thing about version 1.1 is that the turntable is actually hooked up to the stereo. First up on vinyl in the new house: Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The track was Tin Pan Alley for those of you keeping score at home.

The rest of the soundtrack for the writing of this post: Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy and Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Concert.

I’ve wanted to post something recently about the Monday night pickin’ party at the Hi Ho Lounge. We’ve been doing it every Monday now for well over two years. I’ve met and played with some great people and it has created its own little community of players and regulars. It has helped me hone my skill as a player but more importantly it is just a fun and comfortable place to play music and shoot the shit with friends.

Each week it happens and each week I’m still surprised that people show up. Who would have thought? Bluegrass and Country music on St. Claude Ave?

But each time I think about writing about it, I feel as though I can’t quite capture the feel. So I was pretty happy when Ian McNulty wrote this piece about it. I think he captured the quirky improbability of the whole adventure.

Thanks Ian!

I’ve been working on my slide playing lately and have been fascinated by all the mystery and folklore associated with slide guitar. The choice of a slide seems to be one of those things that brings out the curiosity, the experimentation, and the tinkerer in all sorts of people.

Get people talking about their slide and you quickly find yourself in arcane discussions of metal vs. glass, copper vs. steel, wine bottles vs. medicine bottles, store bought vs. old craftsman socket wrenches.

All the discussions got me wanting to try out various sizes, shapes, and materials of slides. Only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any good local outlets for them. It makes sense, I guess. We are talking about a category of good that generally sells for $5 to $20 (generally — they can be MUCH more expensive!), has hundreds of permutations and variations, and very few people will walk in to your store and buy one in any given month. So everyone seems to stock the same few middle-of-the-road options.

Of course, there is always the internet. But given the very personal nature of the quest you can go through a lot of options before finding that right fit. And since — so far — there is no Zappo’s for guitar slides — you order it, you keep it.

So today I dug through our mound of recycling looking for glass bottles that might be converted into slides. New Orleans is no longer picking up glass and K doesn’t want to throw it out so I had a pretty good selection to choose from.

After some internet research — again countless methods for separating wine bottle necks from their bottles — I got ready to try the most promising options. I started using a method of scoring the neck with a glass cutter and then running hot water on the score, shifting to cold water and then tapping the neck to break the score. This method didn’t work for me.

The successful method involved scoring the neck, then rotating the scored neck above a candle flame until sooty all the way around. At that point, you put the bottle under cold water and it pretty much snaps right then. While this method works fast and easy, the results are still what you might expect. The break is simultaneously amazingly crisp and clean and still more jagged than you would like. I don’t know if this can be improved with technique. Or do you just do enough bottles until one breaks perfect?

After the break, I used the dremel tool to ease the edges to make sure there were no sharp points. And voila! My first glass slides.

A great weekend, even if the temperature dropped 30 degrees. K and I managed to get a lot accomplished and still have time to watch Young Frankenstein.

On the large project front, we are taking the next big stab at the back yard which involves busting up the concrete slab where a lean-to shed used to sit. Been a while since we had a reason to pull the sledge hammer out of the attic so we made the most of it.

And for a project of a much smaller scale, I took some time on Saturday to work on a guitar pick. Talking with John Rankin the other night about my tendency to drop my pick during complex rhythm playing, he suggesting several modifications to my right hand technique as well as some mods I could try on my picks themselves. These included gluing sandpaper to the pick, getting some grip tape for the picks (taking me back to my skateboarding days), and drilling holes in the pick to increase its friction.

I opted to try drilling holes in the pick as well as easing the upper and lower edges of the pick just a bit with some sandpaper to assist the pick in crossing the strings. Results so far are promising.

I’ve gone to band camp. Or, at least to bandcamp.

I’ve been searching for a while for an easy way to post my music to the internet. Mostly just to share with friends. I thought that I would hack the music into this blog but mostly that just ended with the failed music section containing scraps of lyrics and occasionally-functioning-but-mostly-broken links to mp3s.

My friends (and probably some hackers) know that I generally just upload files to a media sub-directory and then e-mail out links to people I think might be interested in the songs. Admittedly, not very high-tech and certainly not very effective for long-term sharing.

So ever since my friend Ben told me about bandcamp I’ve been intrigued. A website designed to allow easy uploading and downloading of music. Customizable enough to make it interesting but formulaic enough that it is intuitive to use.

I’ve been poking around over there on and off for a couple weeks but tonight I made it official. I redirected geoffcoats.com to band camp. So now I can just upload songs to that location and any interested parties can download mp3s for free. Or, if you feel like throwing me a bone, you can download high-quality versions for 99 cents. So head over and check it out. I have a couple songs there and will be adding some old ones as well as some new ones (as I write them).

The developers over at Bandcamp even provided an easy mechanism for embedding songs into other websites (like this one):

And if you are a musician, definitely check out bandcamp. The developers are doing some very interesting things over there.