Articles

Ben Garnett is best known in bluegrass circles as the longtime guitarist with Missy Raines and Allegheny. But he’s also a rising star on the new acoustic music scene. It was while majoring in jazz guitar performance at North Texas University that Garnett discovered artists such as Tony Rice, the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and…

Now Touring with Molly Tuttle Molly Tuttle showed up at the ROMP Festival in June of 2025 with a new band (it was their fifth performance).  The configuration of the band she traveled with during the previous few years, Golden Highway, included acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and upright bass.  Her new band was a…

Explores Pre-Bluegrass Flatpicking Guitar  Cameron Knowler, an expert on pre-bluegrass guitar styles, wants you to know that guitars have feelings, too. So much so that he’s written a brilliant guitar method book by that same name. To support that and his many other projects, Knowler created a private press and webstore called Rural Guitar to…

The best. Proclaiming someone as the best this or that is a highly subjective and contentious undertaking, almost certain to create heated debate. So, to hedge the bet a bit: if twenty-five-year-old Trevor Holder is not the best banjo player on the scene right now, he’s in the top two or three. And if he’s…

Just one more year. That mantra still runs through the mind of Special Consensus co-founder Greg Cahill. The banjoist and band leader who started the long-running bluegrass group wanted to play music for a living, but for many years, he had more bills to pay in one hand than dollar bills brought in from the…

In my opinion, John Reischman does everything that relates to playing the mandolin extremely well.  His tone, timing, dynamics, phrasing…you name it, he does it at the level of mastery.  A few other things that he can do extremely well—which proves to me that he is not only a phenomenal mandolin player, but also an…