Articles

Dave Berry is a San Francisco area mandolinist who has created this instrumental project of all-original material with the help of a host of guest artists. On fiddle there is Jee-Hee Haar, Kyle O’Brien, Joe Osborn, Andy Lentz, Helen Lude, Leah Wollenberg and Brandon Godman (violin). Guesting on guitar are Jesse Poteralski, Josh Smith, Olivier…

This is simply one gem of an album, guaranteed to warm even the cynical, holiday-averse hearts. It’s also a lovely, down-home and heartfelt alternative to the canned carols that are force-fed to us at places like Walmart—intended, I suppose, to encourage us to shop more and buy more stuff. The Perfect Gift is also a…

In the increasingly crowded arena of custom and boutique flatpicks, we’ve seen an interesting trend develop. One on side, we find makers who’ve discovered that certain existing industrial materials developed for wildly different purposes than plucking the string of a guitar or mandolin can be fashioned into world-class plectra. The second track we see is…

Steve Bruce is a local pastor in LaFollette, Tennessee, who is also a banjo player and songwriter. On this project of his original material, Bruce is accompanied by his son Andrew Bruce (guitar, bass, resonator guitar), and guests Ron Stewart (mandolin, fiddle), and Glen Duncan (fiddle).  This is an all-instrumental project with Bruce’s excellent banjo…

Jeff Black credits a small-but-mighty banjo with providing inspiration for his song, “Gold Heart Locket,” recorded by Black (B-Sides and Confessions/2003) and later by Sam Bush (Circles Around Me/2009). “I’ll always think that song was in that little banjo,” said Black, during a songwriter’s round at The Bluebird Cafe, Nashville. In an exclusive interview for…

The ProPik brand of finger and thumb picks that are used by banjo, Dobro, fingerstyle guitar, and autoharp players have been available for forty years.  The story of how the company got their start is an interesting one.  It begins in 1982 when a guitar-playing design engineer named Jim Mapson, who lived in Orange County,…