Pain Celtic Squall rehearsed last night. For those that don’t know, this is my “other band.” It’s a quartet comprising Heather (my wife), Phil (from the Boggards) and Claire (from the Wives).

Once faire was over, we started using our regular rehearsal time to record, and we’ve made a good deal of progress toward a finished CD. We’ve recorded just about everything we were well-rehearsed on, and it’d been so long since we rehearsed, we decided it was time to take a break from recording and start playing together again.

Pain. Great pain.

I’m playing upright bass in Squall, which is a physically taxing instrument to play — not as bad as playing piano in a marching band, mind you, but difficult nonetheless. I’ts a large instrument. Everything’s far away from everything else. And it takes a lot of force to generate a note.

When I first started playing it, it was pretty continuous pain. My plucking fingers were raw and constantly on the verge of blistering. My fingerboard hand was always cramping from from trying to push down the very heavy guage strings (not to mention the callouses, which weren’t even in the same place as my bouzouki callouses).

That was when I started, and I sort of feared a resurgance of this kind of pain when we started rehearsing last night. Yes, there was a little bit of the cramping and the friction pain, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

Arthritis. Arthritis in my elbows. Both of them. It was quite painful, actually.

Age has certainly brought advantages that I hadn’t forseen:

But I  don’t dig the aches and pains.