> > > > > Hey, here's an idea. Maybe you and I and Chris could be the official forum band or something. What instruments do you play, or do you just sing? Of course, this being a text-based format, we would just have to get together and post messages about what we're playing and how awesome we would sound if people could hear us.
> > > >
> > > > Yay! The last forum band I was in never got off its feet, but I'm willing to try again.
> > > >
> > > > I have to tell you, I have limited practice jamming. The only people I can find to do it with seem to stick to the same few songs. Very few songs. They played them ad nauseum until I gave up and figured them out and now I jam with them. Man, I could really use some new tunes, though. I'm getting tired of learning them all from *books.*
> > > >
> > > > > Now please stop quoting from the Sound of Music. Next we'll have to teach you how to sing all the songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Hehehe.
> > > > >
> > > > > Brunnen-"a better musician than the great Dave Lister"G
> > > >
> > > > Chr"er... yeah... good ol' Dave..."is
> > >
> > > :-) You sound just like me. About every six months I try to roust out a few good people to start a band with, and every single time I either end up having to give them free music lessons or getting completely bored with their favourite two or three pieces. Last year I found a girl who could supposedly play the flute and we were going to get a cellist and do trios from a book I had, and every time we practised it was just a free two-hour lesson from me on timing. I could play the flute better than her and I'm self taught. AND I can't play anything with a B in it because my flute cost $40 at a garage sale and is lacking certain essential features. Ack.
> > > So maybe a virtual band is the way to go, all right.
> > > Dave Lister was a character from Red Dwarf who liked to think he could play the electric guitar. The other characters only allowed him to play in a spacesuit out in the airlock.
> >
> > Almost sounds like me.
> >
> > Well, rest assured, my timing is fine. my violin is worse than your flute, I bet. About 70 years old, factory made in Checkloslovokia [sp]. Not too mollycoddled in its "prime," stored in a Californian attic for several years, no Dampit, of course, shipped up here and restored. The price fluctuates with how much rosin I have in the case.
> >
> > And the fiddle is my main instrument.
> >
> > Which is why I'll bite the bullet this summer and get a real job. *grimace*
> >
> > > Brunnen-"obsessive musical instrument collector"G
> >
> > Chr"just plain obsessive"is
> Oh, being obsessive can be so much fun. At last count, this is my collection: one good classical guitar, one cheapo guitar (my original one), one unbelievably awful guitar which I found abandoned in the garage of a house I rented once, B-less flute as mentioned, four tin whistles, assorted recorders, bagpipe chanter, mandolin, home-made clarsach (wire-strung medieval harp) which you sort of have to see to believe (but it sounds great), Aoyama lever harp, the stick from a bodhran (the bodhran itself vanished I know not where, but I'd like to get it back again some day), an African finger piano, a bamboo pan pipe, a harmonica, and Egyptian zilds.
>
> Brunnen-"and about eighty spare strings, two dozen cassettes of vocal exercises, and four hundred billion books of sheet music"G

I *never* have spare strings for more than two weeks. Ever. Which is why I'm generally so reluctant to change the ones I have and I still keep the old ones. (I know, I know.) So, the out-of-use bedroom that I've adopted as my studio has all kinds of unravelling, twisted, rosin-caked strings lying about. Along with various tuning items, old sheet music, new sheet music, music books, old music books, personal music books, lesson music books, school music (shudder), manuscript paper, original forst drafts of odd compositions, junk that didn't make it up the stairs to the room I sleep in (as oppesed to the one I live in) and all manner of wonderfully unidentifiable things.

OK accoustics, though. not great, but manageable.