The Sound

Hatfield Delivers the Real McCoy It’s an age-old conundrum for anyone trying to learn a new instrument.  You first buy a cheap banjo, guitar or mandolin to see if you even enjoy playing it. The further you progress, and the more time you put in, the more your instrument’s shortcomings become apparent. Pretty soon you’re ready…

Mandolin-Building’s Odd Couple Together, Tom Ellis and Pava Knezevic have taken Ellis’s 40+ years of building mandolins and producing pearl inlays on a commercial scale—and their vastly different backgrounds—and created a partnership that clearly is more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, without encouragement from Pava, we might well have never seen Ellis return…

and the American Fiddle Method In 1998 fiddle player Brian Wicklund wrote and published his first instructional book for fiddlers, titled The American Fiddle Method. To date that book, distributed by Mel Bay Publications, has sold over 75,000 copies. In 2000, a second volume in the series was published. In 2002, Brian was looking for…

“It’s one of those wonderful lines that trips magically off the tongue,” said Donna Ulisse of the title of the song “You Ain’t Heard Lonesome Yet,” cowritten with husband Rick Stanley and cut by Doyle Lawson.  “We have a little island out in the kitchen of our ‘Little House,’” said Ulisse, referring to where she…

How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Play the Guitar Meet Mickey Abraham: Teacher, musician, and all-around good fellow. Longtime subscribers to Flatpicking Guitar Magazine will already be well familiar with Mickey, as his excellent monthly instructional guitar column and tablatures have graced the pages of the flatpick.com website beginning around 2008 and continue on…

Setting The Standard For Art And Function What do you get when you combine a master metalsmith/engraver with a multi-instrumentalist?  In the case of Ron Landis, the answer is that you get custom crafted sterling silver fingerpicks unlike any other fingerpicks currently available.  While Archimedes postulated that “the shortest distance between two points is a…