I’m Bad (but) I’m Nationwide

Unbeknownst to me, it seems that I now have a national ( and beyond) distribution deal in place for a piece of my music! My thanks to the Right Reverend Theodore Munk for including my instrumental tune “Corn On The Cob” as part of the music compilation found in Episode 8 of his ongoing correspondence series. Those of you who are fortunate enough to exchange letters with Ted will know what I am talking about when I mention his correspondence series.

Ted is an amazingly creative individual who seemingly never fails to come up with new and interesting ideas when it comes to both his blog as well as his personal correspondence. Not only that, but Ted is the person behind the scenes over at the Typewriter Database that keeps things there humming along. (I’ll take this opportunity to remind those of you with typewriters to be sure to head over to the TWDB and sign up if you haven’t already done so. For those of you who have already done so but who have yet to add entries for all of your typewriters, why not go add another one today? )

The Typewriter Database is surely one of the most used resources out there for us typewriter enthusiasts and collectors. We should all try to do our part in helping Ted out by adding those machines that we own to the mix. In the end it helps to make the TWDB a better and more informative place for us all. Those of you who aren’t so fortunate to swap letters with Ted can find my tune Corn On The cob here:

billguthrie.com/music

However, you’ll still be missing out on the contributions from a number of musically-minded minded members of the typewriter community. Among them is the Right Reverend Theodore Munk himself. As I often say, the best thing about typewriters in my opinion is the typewriter community itself.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: If you haven’t noticed by now, I generally can’t help but employ some self-deprecating humor whenever talking about myself. Funnily enough, when I was young I mistakenly referred to this as “self-defecating humor”. Now that I think about it, this actually wasn’t all that far off the mark. While I can find plenty to fault in terms of my guitar playing, doing so has provided me with a great deal of stress relief for many years. However, typewriting has sort of taken the place of guitar playing in this regard for the time being. I personally find the stress relief provided by typing to be one of the most underrated aspects of using these machines.

When I was younger my fingernails wore like iron and this was a real boon to me as a fingerpicker/fingerstyle type of guitarist (one who plucks the strings with the individual fingers on their picking hand rather than using a pick). But with age came a number of problems for the health of my nails. These included some deformation in the form of small ridges running the length of my nails along with cracking, both of which were rather detrimental to “my tone”. I keep trying to make my peace with playing using just my bare fingertips (minus the nails), but so far this has yet to work out as things now sound and feel considerably different to me. Hey, at least I have my typing to fall back on.