The Sound

With A Lot of Help from Its Friends Shaken by tragic personal loss and global economic turmoil, the Santa Cruz Guitar Company and its founder, legendary luthier Richard Hoover, have come through a perfect storm of emotional and business challenges over the past two years and emerged stronger than ever as the company celebrates 45…

Bob Minner Pays Tribute to Norman and Nancy Blake Although Bob Minner has spent the majority of his musical life over the past thirty years performing as a member of country star Tim McGraw’s band, he is still a bluegrass flatpicker at heart.  By the time he was twelve, Bob was studying the guitar playing…

If you’ve ever searched “Dobro Lessons” on YouTube, you’ve probably come across the lessons posted by “Dobro Joe” Wilson.  You can also find a couple of lessons from Joe on the lessons page of the Bluegrass Unlimited website.  While it is generally harder to find Dobro lessons than lessons for guitar, mandolin, banjo, or fiddle,…

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…