Kantele Spring

It's another beautiful Spring day in Minnesota. The sky is blue and the breeze is blowing dandelion fluff all around. Too bad we don't like dandelions too much in these parts, I liked them well enough as a child. In the neighborhood I grew up in, we would pick the dandelions when they were in full seed, make a wish and blow them off the stem. If the seeds traveled all the way around the world and back again, your wish would come true.

The wish I have now is to take some of the traditional Finnish tunes I've learned on my lovely five string kantele, and create TAB for the mountain dulcimer with it. I've tried struggling with MusEdit, which is a free program with some nifty features. The problem is it doesn't always do what I tell it to do, and since it's free, there isn't a manual. Let's just say it has a few glitches that are not about to go away. In fact the website appears to be gone, so it looks like it's time to get real and pay for TablEdit.

My order has been placed, so I know what I will be doing on the rainy days this Spring, getting all my music down in TAB format. It's a wonderful tool, and now that I've written 1 2/3 songs (really, can't seem to get the middle part of that second song down yet) I'm excited to see them written in music. It's an exciting time for me while I wait for my Dream Autoharp. They have received my first payment, so they can start building it any time. For some reason the mail took it's own sweet time, so the check sent on the 24th of April didn't arrive until the 10th of May. So my dream was in limbo during that wait, now it's in Pete's capable hands. So my zither obsession continues, complete with dreams of obscure instruments in the zither family that never existed. Really, that's how deep these stringed instruments get for me, right on into my subconscious.

Well, it's not raining now, so I've spent enough times tapping away at this keyboard.

Next Week: MUSIC PARTY!!