Reading the post Loud Banjo reminded me of something that happened years ago when I was first learning the banjo:
When I started on 5-string I had been playing guitar for a number of years, and had gotten into the habit of watching TV with my wife, quietly noodling/practicing on the guitar. I attempted to do the same thing with the banjo, but wearing fingerpicks makes playing quietly impossible. After just a few minutes my wife said “Please do that somewhere else.”
So I went down to our bedroom.
Our bedroom was right across the hall from my daughters room, where she had a small Vcr/Tv combo (remember those?) where she would watch her tapes of Disney movies. After just a few minutes she came in and said “Daddy please! I can’t hear my movies!”
So, again, I took my banjo and walked away. Well, it was a pretty nice day outside, so I set up a folding chair under our carport and again began to practice. After a few minutes of this I started thinking “I should have come out here in the first place. I can get this thing going as loud as I want without bothering anybody!” So I did.
I let myself get lost in my ever-so-slowly improving banjo rolls, and after a while I noticed that my neighbors youngest son was standing at the edge of their yard holding a BB rifle.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether he had already pinged off a shot at me, or was fixing to, so I stopped and said, “Hey Buddy, were you saying something to me?”
He said “Yeah! Will you stop playing that thing? You’re scaring off all the birds!”
