Reviews
At ArtistWorks, Feedback Is A Good Thing
ArtistWorks (AW) takes pride in being different. The interactive digital platform employs proprietary technology invented by co-founder David Butler, a tech savvy IT industry pro, that gives AW students direct access to their teacher via user-submitted videos. The artist replies directly with taped personal critiques delivered to the student’s account. These back-and-forth interactions—what the company…
Reel Ear Web Apps for Ear Training
Learning to play music by ear is an important skill, especially for bluegrass musicians. Having music notation or tablature with you in the campground or parking lot jam sessions is not always possible. Additionally, you are not always going to know the tunes that are called out at the jam. If you want to participate…
Wes Corbett Peghead Nation Course
“The thing to think about with playing music and with playing an instrument is that whatever box you’re putting yourself in is the one you’re going to be able to create in,” Wes Corbett tells his students in Peghead Nation’s Contemporary Bluegrass Banjo course. Corbett is a former banjo professor at Berklee College of Music…
Strum Machine
When Luke Abbott got bit by the bluegrass bug attending his first festival at the age of 11, no one could have imagined he’d one day create a practice software program thousands of people are using to keep their chops up during self-isolation. Strum Machine is an app that allows users to set the tempo…
Tunes & Ballads
Tim Stafford On his latest solo CD, Tim Stafford artfully carries the listener from the redolent smells of greasepaint, bison sweat and saddle leather inside the big top tent of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to the gruesome and much publicized serial murders in Victorian London’s Whitechapel District (which oddly are overlapping eras) in a…
Cascade
Wes Corbett Padiddle Records “Cascade” is banjoist Wes Corbett’s first solo project since becoming the newest member of the Sam Bush Band. Corbett, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, now resides in Nashville where he also teaches banjo. Corbett cites his influences as Earl Scruggs’ banjo style, but also the melodic…