Bend, Oregon - is it worth a visit?

My wife and I moved to Oregon last year but had not been the to the Central OR tourist town of Bend yet so we did a late summer mid-week trip to check it out. The 3.5 hour drive to Bend included a boring stretch of I-5 from Tigard to Salem and a scenic 120+ miles through mountains and alongside rivers, creeks, and lakes via OR-22 and US-20. I would not want to do that drive during the winter, but it would be a pleasant way to go during other times of the year.

Bend is described as breathtaking in marketing blurbs. The area around Bend may be breathtaking, but it's not a term I would use once you are in the town itself. The term I would use is walkable. There is a high concentration of shops, restaurants and breweries in the downtown area. Most are within a ten minute walk. Plus there are pathways and parks along the Deschutes River. As I mistakenly found out, there is no reason to walk all the way to the Old Mill District as it really is just an outdoor mall with big box stores and chain restaurants.

Bend sits at 3,623 feet above sea level. This arid high desert climate is at just enough altitude to experience the effects of thin air. I normally wouldn't give this a second thought but the massive 23,000 acre Flat Fire was burning not far away in Sisters OR which made the air quality unhealthy. With daytime temps hitting 90 degrees plus unremitting sunshine, we weren't really motivated to do any of the outdoor activities that Bend is known for. Like I said, the town itself is walkable. The place we stayed had its own parking spot so once we parked we didn't have to move the car again for two days. Our main outdoor activity involved walking from one place to another! Consumer, consumer.

Bend did live up to some of its stereotypes. For example, there is a high concentration of tall, skinny, outdoorsy types who look like they just walked out of a Patagonia, Stio, or Carhartt catalog. These folks procreate so you can expect their blonde-haired 2.5 kids to be running wild at any brewery or restaurant you go to that isn't 21 and up. I don't think it was quite as bad as usual though since we were there mid-week when kids are supposed to be back in school.

Here are some places worth mentioning:

Jackson's Corner - a nice spot for breakfast, coffee or lunch in Old Bend. An excellent BLT sandwich. 

The Cellar - kind of like a basement speakeasy with a British pub theme. Featuring cask-conditioned ESB, red ale and porter from Porter Brewing Company in Redmond, and imported Kilkenny, Guinness and Old Speckled Hen on nitro. They have old-time Appalachian fiddle-style music on Wednesdays and an Irish session on Thursdays!

Spider City Brewing Downtown Tasting Room - a smaller, quiet space offering beer and wine. 

McMenamins Old St. Francis School Hotel - another one of the sprawling McMenamins properties that can be found throughout and Oregon and Washington. There's nothing else like it in Bend. See if you can find the hidden Broom Closet Bar!

Dudley's Bookshop Cafe - a two-story book store with a mix of new and used books. I always like going into bookstores while traveling and Dudley's was a pretty good one.

Pine Tavern and Bend Brewing Company - both of these places have outdoor areas along Mirror Pond, an impoundment of the Deschutes River. Both are better than you might expect them to be.

Mirror Pond, Drake Park and the Deschutes River Trail - Bend has made good use of its location along the Deschutes River by having green spaces and walking paths. Not much shade though!

Thai restaurants - Bend is not known for its diversity, but it does seem to have a different Thai restaurant on each block. What's up with that?

Cool poster in McMenamins Art House

River walk in Bend, OR

Our place had a welcoming courtyard

Tin Pan Alley in Bend

Was it worth the visit? Yes, although it's no match for the Oregon coast.

Would I go back to Bend? Maybe for a concert at the Hayden Homes Amphitheatre just across the river from downtown. 

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How to Change your Banjo Strings

One of my music goals for this year is to get better at and more comfortable with banjo string changes. I have a custom made 5-string tenor banjo with five equal length strings so at least I don't have to deal with re-stringing that short drone or thumb string, but otherwise everything else is the same. You hook the loop end of the string at the tailpiece and run it through the tuner at the headstock. Banjos and mandolins with floating bridges are similar in this regard.

Let me say this. I am not good at changing strings. I sweat and agonize over it, and I have to make an effort to remain calm while doing it. And it takes me like 45 minutes. But that is about to change with practice and a new mindset. This is not a post by me telling you how to change banjo strings because I am not qualified to do that. I am simply sharing some articles that I found helpful and will want to refer back to later.

Whenever I have had a luthier or shop tech do a string change for me, the instrument always came back with the new strings winded (wound?) two or three revolutions or more around the tuner. This looks pretty but I just don't see myself doing that. Fortunately there's a simpler method where you simply lock-in the string. 

Here's a link to a page demonstrating this step by step. What I like about this is it's written as an article with pictures. That works better for me than a video.

http://frets.com/FretsPages/Musician/Banjo/BanjoStringing/banjostr2.html

I actually think his mandolin restringing article from the same site is equally if not more helpful.

http://frets.com/FretsPages/Musician/Mandolin/MandoString/mandostring1.html

I'll be checking these out the next time I change strings!

All 4ths versus All 5ths Tuning

I'm most familiar with all 5ths tuning like on a tenor banjo. I have also experimented with all 4ths by tuning my Vagabond travel guitar in all 4ths EADGCF. To that end, I thought I would jot down some compare/contrast notes about each tuning.  

All 4ths

-Easier to play in any key.

-Utilizes closed shapes, doesn't rely on open strings.

-Pattern oriented.

-You can play melodies anywhere on the fretboard, not just first position.

-You have more fingering choices for how you want to play a melody and sometimes you might have the same note in two places.

-Due to the way the strings are spaced, you might have string jumps that you wouldn't have in all 5ths tuning.

-Due to the shorter range from string to string, it's better to have 5 or 6 strings like on a guitar rather than 4 like on a violin.

-Works for guitar length scale of 25 inches, although could also work for a shorter scale length.

All 5ths

-Suited to fiddle tune repertoire.

-Wider intervals means you rely on open strings to play melodies.

-You tend to stay in first position.

-Only needs 4 strings total or 5 at the most.

-Best for shorter scale instruments like 21-inch scale or shorter.

-Some say the 5ths interval has more resonance or a more pleasant harmony than 4ths.

If I Could Have Musical Influences, What Would They Be?

If I was going to take music lessons again, it would be on the subject of "what can I learn from these musicians?". I would work with an instructor who is willing to go over the playing styles and techniques of 3 or 4 musicians with me to see what I can learn or draw from their playing. 

As someone who is learning/memorizing Irish tunes on tenor banjo and then bringing said tenor banjo to Irish pub sessions and using it to play monophonic unison tunes in a group setting, it would make sense for me to be influenced by players who do that specifically. Those cats would include John Carty, Angelina Carberry, Kieran Hanrahan, Kevin Griffin, and Daithí Kearney. I especially like Daithí Kearney's playing since he does a lot of slides and polkas, which you don't always hear Irish tenor banjo players doing.

Surprise, surprise. None of these musicians in the subject of this hypothetical study with an instructor would be players of Irish music, even though my goal would be to take whatever influence I could extract and apply it to my hobby of playing Irish tunes. The first four musicians would be:

-Puerto Rican Cuatro player Maso Rivera. Suggested track: De La Montaña Venimos from Reyando Con Maso Y Su Cuatro.

-Kali, a banjo-mandolin(?) player from Martinique in the French West Indies. Suggested track: Bel Plesi from his Racines, Vol 1 & 2 CD.

-Another banjo-mandolin player...Dennis Pash of the Etcetera String Band and the Ragtime Skedaddlers. The super obscure CD Bonne Humeur - in which Pash plays his interpretations of the early dance music of Haiti, Trinidad, Martinique, and the Virgin Islands - may have already been a big influence on me.

-Sylvester McIntosh, also known as "Blinky", who was the band leader and alto saxophone player in Blinky and the Roadmasters plus other scratch music bands in the United States Virgin Islands. Anything from their 1990 Rounder records release Crucian Scratch Band Music. 

I suppose four is enough of a start. Three of those four are stringed instrument players - Maso Rivera, Kali, and Dennis Pash - who each use or used some type of pick/plectrum to pluck/flat-pick the strings. The only non-string instrument player is Blinky, so I'm not exactly sure what I'd be trying to get from his playing but that's where an instructor could help.

An extended list of musicians who I'd like to draw from would include Norman Blake, Jerry Garcia, Elmer Snowden, Michael Kang, Don Vappie, Tiny Moore, and Jamaican mento 4-string banjo players in general. Once again, not to play their styles of music per se, but to continue playing Irish tunes albeit with the feel of those musicians in mind. 

One thing you wouldn't hear in most of these influences,  I am guessing, is some of the rhythmic qualities that show up in Irish trad, such as the 6/8 jig, the 9/8 slip jig, and 12/8 slides. Those are some of my favorite types of tunes! So it could be a bit of a leap to go from listening to Maso Rivera, for example, and then apply those picking techniques to an Irish jig. But it could be done I suppose.

Does this make any sense at all?

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