The Sound

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…

“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…

The Banjo Sound  Never Gets Old If you were to picture someone sitting outdoors picking on a five-string banjo, the setting that comes to mind would probably be somewhere in the southern regions of the United States—most likely in the area of southern Appalachia—as opposed to say, southern California.  Southern California and banjos are not…