The guitar I brought was my little Martin LX1E travel guitar. It's a tough little work-horse and survived the trip pretty well, altho it's now in serious need of new strings.
The banjo I brought was my little Gold Tone Mini, also sized for travel. Had I been warned about this in advance I wouldn't have brought it, but the damp salt air and constant exposure to moisture caused some serious corrosion on all the metal parts. I'm going to have to totally dis-assemble it and polish up the metal, oil the wood and make it pretty again. It's sitting on my father-in-law's work bench awaiting its bath, which Dad and I are going to undertake as a family project.
And as a matter of fact, I did write a couple songs on that cheesey soprano uke. My inspiration
for one of them was the constant "song of the sirens", which I swear exists. I don't know whether the sound came from the sea, the cosmos, the engine or maybe just the inside of my head, but there was music playing on that boat pretty much all the time. If it had just been a constant pitch I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but it sounded like a choir singing and there was a I - IV - V chord progression, which actually changed slightly from day to day. Sometimes it was a I - IV - I - IV - I - V - I progression. And it was usually in the key of A. On a couple different days there was also a solo bass voice on the bottom singing the root notes of the chords. I'm pretty sure that was Neptune singing. (Yeah, I know - they're coming to take me away - Ha - Ha - they're coming to take me away.)
Anyway, I finally got so annoyed with this incessant music that I tried putting in ear plugs. If I held them in real tight it did shut those sirens up, dispelling the notion that the sound was in my head. But I finally gave up holding my fingers in my ears and just wrote the song the sirens were trying to teach me. I need to write some more lyrics and finish it up.
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