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The Strawberry Music Festival held at Camp Mather, near Yosemite National Park in California, runs for 4 days around both Memorial Day and Labor Day. Thursday (9/4/09) marks the beginning of the Strawberry's fall festival.

This fall festival line up is an exciting one for me. It's heavy, as usual, on roots music featuring a lot of folks I've never heard --or even heard of! So I'll be soaking up new (to me) music almost all weekend.

But the mandolin players, as far ...

Farmer's Market (Oakdale CA) gig in July. I was playing through my new Marshall G15R CD amp (15w solid state, 8" speaker). I would have taken the Ampeg J12T (15w, 2 EL84s, 12" speaker) but I was told the gig was "acoustic." I did not want to bring too much firepower to the gig and scare the organizers off, so the Marshall ended up in the back of the Prius.

The gig went really well, and the city of Oakdale hired us back for a late August date. The Marshall, ...

I am presently addicted to old timey music. I still have my love for Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton traditional music, and French Canadian fiddle tunes, and I still love the New England old time tradition, as well as Klezmer and Eastern European music, and Western Swing, Tango, and... and...

But right now I am addicted to the music of Appalachia. And in particular, Southern Appalachia.

What I like best about old timey music is its worship of the tune. This is not ...

Some of you mandophiles are probably aware of the Healdsburg Guitar Festival. Every two years Luthiers Merchantile International of Healdsburg CA puts on a convention and exhibition for guitar luthiers. A few hundred one-man (or very small shop) builders bring examples of their work hoping to sell or take orders from custom instruments. LMI also hosts discussion panels and luthiery lectures for builders. For players, they offer instrument demonstrations of the exhibiting builders' work, a cabaret ...

I am thinking a stripped down approach is a good one for this installment. So much went on during this long weekend that writing it all down here in prose is impractical and will make for less than riveting reading. With that in mind I’ve decided to share the Studio Log I created. But to add some interest I have included notations where and when interesting parts occurred or insights were gained.

➢ Personnel
o Tim Lechuga, AKA Señor: Bandleader, producer, acoustic guitar, ...

[This past weekend, I was working in the studio (Blue Dragon Studio) with Señor Circus and kept a log. I wrote down a bunch of thoughts and will share them with you as I get them together. As a bit of a warm up –writing is a process as much as music is—I thought I would share my thoughts about playing electric in an “acoustic” setting.]

Studio work this past weekend was punctuated pleasantly by a pair of two set gigs. The first was on Friday evening at Billy Goats Tavern, the second ...

This is a repost of a thread starter that was fairly blog like. The update is that I will be revisiting the location this fall, and I will know ahead of time about the jam and show up again, this time for three weeks running. I sent emails, and seem to be remembered, so this should be fun. So... about a year ago...


So here I am in a strange city, for one week, for work. Of course I brought my mandolin, at least to play in the hotel room in the evening.


...

I wrote this in the Two Pointer Social Group but decided it's probably better off here--in the blog section. Just another of my two cents.....


For the most part, Ive been a first position player. Every now and then, when the fingering order fits, I might "escape" all the way up to the tenth fret.

Bluegrass Up The Neck by Niles Hokkanen has been highly recommended on the Cafe and his YouTube video is exactly what I strive to play-----so I ordered his ...

Bandleader, Tim, of Señor Circus has booked time at a recording studio way up north near Mount Shasta CA. Both Tim and the engineer want me to bring "everything." "Everything?" says I. "Everything" says Tim.

The engineer is apparently excited to see how I got such a convincing Santanaesque tone without a guitar. He also wants to see the mandocaster. Plus we'll be doing a couple of acoustic gigs in the area. So...

Two amps, two emandos, ...

I have always seen this music as a subset of Old Time, what a number of folks would call Northern Old Time, as it has so much New England and French Canadian, and Irish/Scottish influence as Appalacian. If it is its own category of music, well thats great, I would not argue.

It is a body of tunes. I recently checked out a contra-dance web site in an entirely different part of the country from where I live, a place I have never been, and I found their set list was entirely familiar ...