I may have split an infinitive in my title, but I'll let my editor worry about that. Paraphrasing Lt. Colonel Kilgore in "Apocalypse Now," I will say that "I love the sound of split infinitives in the morning."
But I digress. The topic of practice has been on my mind for a few weeks as I find myself at the ripe old age of 65 practicing a variety of things in an effort to attain at least some level of proficiency.
I try to approach my subjects with some semblance of order. So, generally speaking, after morning coffee I head down to the basement to practice my drums. I find that a lot of people don't realize just how loud drums can be or how difficult they are to master. Linda can vouch for their loudness. She says everything vibrates upstairs when I am playing drums.
I've had some friends express surprise that drums follow any structure at all such as timing or beat or notes on a sheet of music. But they do. In fact, drums are quite complicated, especially since you must use both hands and both feet, and all four have to move independently of each other, as well as in concert together, for the drummer to play good music.
So, most of the time, you are playing the high hat cymbals which sit to your left with your right hand while you play the snare drum which sits directly to the right of the high hat with your left hand. This may sound confusing, but if you ever sit down to a set of drums it will make perfect sense. The floor tom is operated mostly by your right foot, but you can put a slave pedal on so that you can use both feet for really fast drumming. Your left foot also operates the high hat cymbal so that you can move it up and down while tapping it with your right hand.
Learning to de-couple your limbs from one another feels really awkward at first, and counting time as you use both hands and feet is challenging. What really gets tricky is the fact that you only count time when you play the snare drum or the floor tom. If you are only playing the high hat, you don't count that beat. If you are playing the high hat together with either the floor tom or the snare drum, then you do. And notes that are only played on the high hat are mixed into the music all the time. So you may be counting something like this: one and a two and three, four and a one, two and a four. But you are actually hitting more beats than that but not counting the high hat beats. Such is life.
In the shop, I have been busy with several things, but I also try to set aside time each day to practice new skills. Recently, I determined once again to learn how to cut dovetailed joints by hand, and this time I have actually stuck with it to the point that I feel encouraged to keep practicing. I hope to make a new chest of drawers for our bedroom and the drawers will be made using dovetails. I have a good jig for cutting dovetails with a router. This jig works pretty well once you learn how to set it up, but there is something about cutting them by hand that speaks to the woodworker in me.
I'm finding that the biggest issues with cutting dovetails by hand are needing to take great care in laying out and marking the dovetails and having very sharp chisels to work with. So one thing leads to another. Since chisels don't stay sharp forever, I am having to learn how to sharpen chisels -- by hand, of course. And just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to sharpen a chisel. Currently, I am using a combination of sandpaper and water stones to hand sharpen. I also use a honing guide from Lie-Nielsen.
Many woodworkers use a bench grinder, but you can ruin a chisel real fast that way by overheating the blade and making the metal too soft to hold an edge. And besides, using a grinder would defeat the purpose of learning how to do it by hand.
As far as what practice can do for your skill level, I wish you could see the first dovetail joint I ever cut by hand. For a long time, I had that monstrosity hanging on the back wall of my shop where only I could see it. I think I must have thrown it away at some point or another. Now, I'm at least good enough to leave my practice pieces laying out on the workbench.
Along with these activities, I have also been learning how to use my new lathe and have branched out from pens to seam ripper handles and drumsticks. I recently took a class over in Tulsa for turning bowls and hope to add that to my agenda just as soon as my new lathe chuck arrives.
The lathe provides a nice break from larger projects because a pen only takes an hour or so. And the grandchildren love them. It appears, too, that the daughters-in-law (or is it daughter-in-laws?) like the seam rippers. Linda certainly enjoys hers. The nice wood handle is comfortable in your hand and it gives you much better leverage. Plus you can insert the sharp needle into the handle for safekeeping.
So, between drums, dovetails, sharpening and lathe work, I get in plenty of practice and maybe that's what someone my age needs. I think it's actually good for my brain. It has to be better than sitting around and vegetating anyway. We can all be life-long learners if we so choose. And I would say there are definitely blessings and benefits along the way.
Sam Byrnes is a Gentry-area resident and weekly contributor to the Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 02/13/2019