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The River That Flows Both Ways Chords

May 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

Appar­ently, nobody has the chords up for Rick Nestler’s “The River That Flows Both Ways.” Or if they, do I can’t find them.

So a short bit of time with YouTube, and you get this. He plays it in G, whereas I’ve writ­ten it out in D b/c I can’t that low/high. If you need it dif­fer­ent, you’ll have to either get out your capo and put it on some­thing way high on the neck (5? 7?) or just trans­pose the whole thing in your head.

I rec­om­mend the latter–it’s a skill you won’t regret learning.

With­out fur­ther ado, the chords to Rick Nestler’s (or Pete Seeger, if you haven’t done your home­work) ‘The River that Flows Both Ways’:

The River That Flows Both Ways
Rick Nestler

 D                       A
Once the sachems told a story
                             D
of a land the Great Spirit blessed.
                             A
And the people followed the legend
                              D
from the great waters in the west
         G                                  D
And they stopped where they found that the fishing was good,
     G                             A         D
the earth it was fertile and game ran in the wood.

	G                      D
	I could be happy just spending my days
	G                  A          D
	on the river that flows both ways

First came the trappers, then the traders
Their own fortunes for to find
And the valley treated them kindly
So the farmers followed close behind
Then the sloops sailed well laden ‘round the battery
with flour from Yonkers, furs from Albany.

Writers and painters have shown its beauty
In its waters and on the shore
While musicians sing its praises
And keep alive the river’s lore
With the sun setting golden o’er the Palisades
Afternoon ends and the daylight fades

Maybe it’s the moonshine, maybe it’s the starlight
Reflected in Haverstraw Bay
Maybe it’s the fog that rolls off the Highlands
At the break of a brand new day
But apple cider and pumpkins, strawberries and corn
Make the people of the river glad they were born
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This Blog is Moving! Update your RSS, etc

May 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Orig­i­nally, this blog lived at http://listento.jaketolbert.com.

And then, after a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence with free host­ing, I moved the back end to my home server. Which was a prob­lem, because I used dynamic DNS (which puts me on a sub­do­main auto­mat­i­cally) and as far as I can tell, you can’t have a sub­do­main of a sub­do­main. Or at least, the way my DNS reg­is­trar played w/ Dyn­DNS, I couldn’t get it to work.

So, the blog sort of moved to http://jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog. But I left the orig­i­nal address work­ing. Actu­ally, I for­warded all of jaketolbert.com to that address.

Well, the time has come to fix that up–I need to straighten things out, so listento.jaketolbert.com is going away. If you’re still sub­scribed there, you’ll need to change the address to jaketolbert.com/blog (or jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog–either will work since the for­mer will just for­ward to the latter).

It’s going to take me a cou­ple days to get it all straight­ened out (and for the DNS changes to shake out around the inter­net) but that at least lets you know what’s up in case you were still sub­scribed at the old spot. I’m chang­ing the feed­burner link now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ListenTo so it’ll still be right…

Enjoy!

Posted in links, web | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

“Along in The Sun and The Rain” Chords

by Woody Guthrie

May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

For what­ever bizarre rea­son, it’s really hard, if not impos­si­ble to find chords to Woody Guthrie’s “Along in the Sun and The Rain” online.

As it turns out, it’s a 2 chord song, so maybe you don’t need them, but here they are. Woody plays it in Cm, but I’m not man enough to play a Cm through a whole song (per­haps he capoed?) so I’ve got it here in Am.

 Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Along in the sun and the rain
Along, a long, a long long long
              Em           Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Hey, boys, I've come a long ways...

I seen a whole lot of things...

I kissed a whole lot of lips...

I've seen a lot of towns...

I've had a lot of fights...

I've shook a lot of hands...

I'm gonna get my job done...
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Building a Cajon: Step 3b

more on gluing the sides

April 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Just a quick post show­ing a cou­ple things about glu­ing the sides:

Clamp­ing, or Per­haps Smashing

Here, I’m clamp­ing the 3rd side on (the other long/tall side). Note that I’m using a cin­der block on top of a scrap to exert down­ward pres­sure, since I’m using all my other clamps to do extert force in other places.

Putting the Bot­tom On

Remem­ber how I said that you don’t have to worry about get­ting every­thing exactly square because it’ll all square itself up? Well, here’s where that hap­pens. As it turns out, I was pretty close, but things were awful tight, so I couldn’t just put the bot­tom in place.

I actu­ally had to slide it down from the top and, in fact, use a rub­ber mal­let to tap it in to place. This resulted in a lot of glue get­ting pushed around, but all in all, it was a fairly tight fit.

And here’s a pic of clamp­ing that. I didn’t use the cin­der block on this one because it’s so much shorter than the other sides–if I set the cin­der block on a scrap, most of the weight would be dis­trib­uted on the other sides rather than the one side I cared about.

So I used one ver­ti­cal clamp. Which wasn’t enough, but it was all I had.

This is by far the hard­est piece to effec­tively clamp, since you can’t get on the inside. How­ever, as I men­tioned before, even with­out the glue, it’s still all really tight in there, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

After this all dries, I’ll be doing a bit of fin­ish­ing work: sand­ing off any parts that aren’t exactly square, fill­ing in any gaps with putty, and maybe even run­ning a saw along an edge or two of the front–I want the tapa to fit on per­fectly flush all the way around.

But we’ll get to that later.

All steps

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Building a Cajon: Step 3

Glue the sides

April 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Ok, I’ve been a lit­tle slow get­ting this done, because, as I men­tioned before, I’m pur­pose­fully drag­ging this project out so I have some­thing to work on in the garage when the weather’s nice.

We’ve already cov­ered cut­ting things out and glu­ing inter­nal brac­ing, so now we’re ready for step 3: glu­ing the sides and tops on.

Remem­ber that we’re going to put the top (which you sit on) and the bot­tom (what sits on the floor) on the out­side, sand­wich­ing the back and the sides (the tapa, or front that you bang on, will go on last and isn’t structural).

Glue on the top

Like we did with the braces, we’re going to use wood glue and clamps to glue every­thing down. If your cuts are square, you should end up with largely square joints, as the sides get clamped not only to each other, but to the braces which sit at right angles to them.

With that in mind, don’t worry too much about this joint being square. If it’s not, it’ll square up once we get every­thing else in there (again, assum­ing your cuts are, for the most part, square).

Glue on the sides

After you glue on the top (again, that’s really the top in the geo­met­ric sense–the part you sit on), glue on the sides, one at a time.

Above, you can see how I’ve clamped the first side. You’ll want to do as much clamp­ing as humanly possible–the more you can pull the side you’re glu­ing close to the brace and the side to which you’re glu­ing it, the tighter the joint will be, which trans­lates into a tighter sound (and a bet­ter look).

After I do this side, I’ll do the other side, and then do the bot­tom after that. Unlike the sides, it’s really dif­fi­cult to clamp the bot­tom, as there’s no way to get clamps on the inside to push the inter­nal brace up against the buttom–you can only use bar clamps to push the two sides together (there might be some fancy way to do this using luthier/woodcraft know-how–I won’t be using it).

I’ll try to post more pics once the whole struc­ture is put together (the back, sides, top and bot­tom). After that, it’s on to putting in the braces for the tapa.

All steps

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Building a Cajon: Step 2

Internal Bracing

March 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Now that we’ve cut out the sides, we a need bit of inter­nal brac­ing before we start glu­ing the sides together.

Oh, did I men­tion, we’re not using any screws in this thing (except in the top/face/head/side-that-you-bang-on)? It’s 100% wood glue all the way.

With that in mind, and for that mat­ter, even if we WERE going to use screws, we want some­thing more sub­stan­tial inside for the fac­ing pieces to attach to.

So we’re going to use bits of 1x1s. Or what­ever we can find in the scrap bin, assum­ing it’s got at least one flat, prefer­ably two flat edges.

You can see in the pic below that I’ve got all my braces cut and laid out. These don’t have to be mea­sured out exact–in fact, I make an effort to make sure I DON’T cut these the same length as the sides so that the braces don’t bump into each other.

cajon braces: for top and back

If you’re really con­cerned about strength, I sup­pose you’d make these all fit up next to each other per­fectly. And they’d all inter­lock and the thing would be able to with­stand a 10 story fall.

As it is, it’s going to be plenty strong, so I cut the braces short so I don’t get part way through and find out that I don’t have room to fit the back onto the top because the braces are in the way of each other.

Also note: the braces that will go around the top/face/place-you-bang-on (ok, in the inter­est of not hav­ing to type that again, I looked it up and appar­ently the proper name for this piece is tapa so that’s what I’m call­ing it from now on) are sup­posed to be hard­wood. I assume this is because you’re using screws (you want to be able to vary how attached the tapa is) and you want to make sure they won’t pull out when you start whack­ing on it.

You’re going to have to go the store on this one and buy some hard­wood dow­els. I think I got a cou­ple 5/8″ dow­els or some­thing like that–they were $2.50 each, which seems steep to me. Good luck find­ing this stuff in the dumpster–almost all lum­ber, includ­ing MOST trim is pine.

Then again, you only need (2) 2′ pieces and (2) 10–12″ pieces, so if you’re lucky you might be able to find some nice oak trim scraps (maybe out of some old cab­i­nets? who knows). I didn’t include these braces in the pic since I’ll be putting them in later (and differently).

Step 2b: Glue the braces

Once you get your braces cut, you want to glue them in. You want them glued in first so the piece you glue in has some­thing secure to grab on to. But that’s a prob­lem because you’ve got to leave room for the piece that you’re not yet ready to glue to go.

So I made a lit­tle jig. It’s just a small scrap of my 3/4″ ply­wood left over from saw­ing, screwed tightly to another piece of wood that’s, for the most part, straight.

3/4" plywood screwed to a 1x2

When I’m ready to glue a brace on to the top (or wher­ever), I sim­ply stand the jig up on the top, with the 1×2 hang­ing off. This keep the 3/4″ scrap flush with the edge of the top. Then I lay down my glue and press the brace up next to the jig (see below–in the pic, I’ve left the brace away from the jig just a bit to make it eas­ier to see what’s going on).

I've left the brace, the left-most piece, away from the jig here for clarity

Hold it by hand for a few sec­onds, then remove the jig and clamp, wip­ing off any glue that oozes out. Let that sit over night and move on to your next piece (unless you’ve got more clamps than me, in which case, do as many as you want as fast as you want!).

is there any such thing as too many clamps?

Don’t for­get to do some­thing about any metal clamps you might be using. It’s not a big deal if they dent the braces–those are on the inside of the box and won’t ever bee seen again. But the out­side (what looks like the bot­tom in the pic­ture above) may very well be the most vis­i­ble spot on the whole drum, so throw some­thing between your clamps and the wood.

And that wraps up Step 2!

All steps

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Building a Cajon: Step 1

Cutting the sides

March 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

About a year ago, I built a cajon (a box drum) for my brother. I syn­the­sized a cou­ple sets of instruc­tions that helped a lot.

Recently, I real­ized I’ve still got a lot of mate­ri­als left over so I thought I’d build another one for myself, and this time, doc­u­ment the process.

My objec­tive was to build some­thing on the cheap–the major­ity of the stuff I’m using I already had, either in my scrap bin or as left overs from the last build project. I ended up buy­ing most of the wood, but if I had more time, would have scoured con­struc­tion site dump­ster for the stuff I needed.

You don’t need a lot of wood–I’m sure if you’re patient, you could find what­ever you needed in bet­ter qual­ity than what I used.

Step 1: Cut the frame

For the out­side frame (but not the “head”/face of the drum), you want the thick­est nicest ply­wood you can afford/find.

I used 3/4″ press­board. Using press­board is a musi­cal no-no, but a 4×8 sheet with one bro­ken cor­ner was about 4 times cheaper, at the lum­ber­yard, than 3×4 sheet of good stuff, so I went with it.

The cajon I’m build­ing is 2′ tall, 10″ deep and 14″ wide.

So I cut out 5 pieces:

  • Top: 14″ x 10″
  • Bot­tom: 14″ x 10″
  • Back: 22½” x 10″
  • Side 1: 22½” x 13¼”
  • Side 2: 22½” x 13¼”

Left-Right: top/bottom, side 1, back, side 2

So the idea is that the top and bot­tom are the most out­side pieces. The back and sides sit between them. And the sides butt up to the back (the back is just as wide as the top/bottom), which is why they’re smaller.

That’s Step 1–pretty simple.

All steps

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Country Music and Tradition

March 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

This arti­cle about how coun­try music is nec­es­sar­ily about being a small-minded bigot trou­bles me.

Ok, in all fair­ness, I’m over­stat­ing the author’s argu­ment. He never once said “bigot” or “small-minded.” He did, how­ever, say a lot of things like:

But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grand­par­ents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in open­ness depend emo­tion­ally on a sense of enchant­ment of the every­day and the pro­fun­dity of rit­ual. Even a lit­tle change, like your kids play­ing with dif­fer­ent toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the insta­bil­ity of life over gen­er­a­tions and the con­tin­gency of our emo­tional attach­ments. This is a reminder low-openness con­ser­v­a­tives would pre­fer to avoid, if possible.

Unstated here, is the author’s incredulity that some­one would (could?) find “a sense of enchant­ment of the every­day and the pro­fun­dity of ritual.”

That some­one could be incred­u­lous that daily rit­ual and long-seated tra­di­tion can be mean­ing­ful and impor­tant seems strangely igno­rant, even for some­one who claims to be “liberal.”

I’ll be the last to defend the sac­crine sen­ti­men­tal­ity of mod­ern coun­try music, which I find emo­tion­ally manip­u­la­tive and artis­ti­cally shal­low. How­ever, the art I cre­ate with my band is specif­i­cally crafted to honor this sort of rou­tine and tra­di­tion WITHOUT the sen­ti­men­tal­ity, to remind us of the good things our grand­par­ents and their par­ents did, with­out tug­ging at heart­strings, and to teach us to open not JUST to new expe­ri­ence, but to OLD expe­ri­ence as well, which I think lib­eral peo­ple (myself included) are largely bad at internalizing.

And per­haps, this is what trou­bles me most about this arti­cle: while tout­ing open­ness to new expe­ri­ences as one his pri­mary val­ues, the author sets up a false dichotomy between old and new expe­ri­ences, where the can­not be synthesized.

In fact, I think it’s only when we can honor the tra­di­tion of which we’re a part while includ­ing new expe­ri­ences and ideas that we can be truly pro­gres­sive. Any­thing less than that involves lying to our­selves about our iden­ti­ties, con­vinc­ing our­selves that we aren’t who we actu­ally are and aren’t influ­enced by the things that have sur­rounded us all our lives.

Posted in christianity, music, postmodernism | Leave a comment

How An Obscure Job Helps with Self-Identification

or how being a geek in a house of non-geeks helped me consider myself a musician

February 21, 2012 | 1 Comment

You know what the great­est thing about hav­ing a job that doesn’t fit into any of the nor­mal cat­e­gories is? It makes it a lot eas­ier to not define your­self by your job.

I started work­ing at Mil­likin a lit­tle over a year ago. What I do is hard to define: it’s not IT, but it’s geeky. I work for the Alumni Office, as part of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Ser­vices team. I over­see our sec­tion of the data­base, although, not directly–I’m respon­si­ble for busi­ness prac­tices and the staff that does day-to-day entry. Plus web com­mu­ni­ca­tion, social media, report­ing and being the department’s lia­son to IT.

Over­all, it’s a great job, but it’s not the kind of thing you can put in a stan­dard form: it’s not IT; it’s not com­mu­ni­ca­tions; it’s not fund-raising. It’s some­where in between all of those.

And as it turns out, this is a huge relief.

A few years ago, I was a cam­pus min­is­ter. That was the pri­mary def­i­n­i­tion of who I was: my job. After that, I worked in mar­ket­ing. And I never really felt at home there, because I never really con­sid­ered myself a “mar­keter” (or mar­ket­ing guru or mar­ket­ing exec or any other ridicu­lous title). Even thought that was my job, I never felt com­fort­able with it defin­ing my iden­tity, even though, most of the time, I felt like it did.

Now, my job doesn’t fit into any neat boxes. I’m not a “cam­pus min­is­ter” nor do I “work in marketing.”

I’m not even “in IT.”

And it’s really freeing–now, I can con­sider myself a father and a Chris­t­ian and a musi­cian and a poet. I might not be par­tic­u­larly good at any of those things, but they’re labels I relate to, regard­less of whether or not I’m mak­ing a liv­ing at them.

Which brings me to the most inter­est­ing ques­tion of this all: why DO we tend to define our­selves by our jobs? and define oth­ers the same way? Is this an Amer­i­can thing (I’ve picked up vague rum­blings online that it is; but I don’t have any way of quan­ti­fy­ing or show­ing that empir­i­cally). And more impor­tantly, how does this sort of mind­set, where we define our­selves pri­mar­ily by our jobs, inform our lives a Chris­tians and how (un?)healthy is it?

Posted in christianity, life | 1 Comment

Replace text with jQuery and Regular Expressions

January 20, 2012 | 1 Comment

Today, I wanted to hide some text on a web­page I was work­ing on. It was a lot of text all through­out the doc­u­ment, but each instance was inside a span and within paren­the­sis inside that.

I could have edited it all out, but it would have been really time consuming–the CMS I’m using had each one in its own element–so I needed a quicker, more pro­gram­matic way to deal with it.

I needed to replace text within a bunch of ele­ments using a reg­u­lar expression.

To do it, I used a bit of jQuery magic:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {
var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");
return content;
});

To walk through this:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {

Here we get all the html/code inside each span. Then we open a func­tion with foo as the index (no clue what this means, it’s just what the doc­u­men­ta­tion says) and old­html is a vari­able that lets us manip­u­late what used to be in there.


var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");

Here, we make con­tent a new vari­able and use replace and a reg­u­lar expres­sion that looks for any­thing that’s in paren­the­sis and removes it. The .replace func­tion is a reg­u­lar Javascript func­tion, not any fancy jQuery nonsense.

Of impor­tant note here: the reg­u­lar expres­sion does NOT go in quotes, but the “replace it with this” string does. Also, you have to escape the paren­the­sis because if you don’t, you end up grouping.

The rest of the code just dumps out the new, manip­u­lated string; and because we’re using the html() func­tion, the returned string is what ends up as the con­tents of the orig­i­nal selected span.

Got that? Good.

Posted in computer, open source, web | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

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