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Bluegrass fans are always impressed by the musicians who can play blistering fast solos with accuracy, clarity and tone. This skill is certainly impressive and a guy like mandolin player Josh Rilko knows how to do it. However, the thing that impresses me the most about Josh’s mandolin playing is his ability to play solos…

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…

The Bay Ramblers were a San Fransisco Bay Area bluegrass band that performed for a couple of years in the mid-1980s at venues like Paul’s Saloon and the Grass Valley Bluegrass Festival.  Some of the shows at those two venues were recorded live, and Sandy Rothman, who was the banjo player in the band, has…

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…

In 2015, Seth Mulder and some friends began playing at the local Ole Smokey Moonshine Distillery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The group based their music on traditional bluegrass with a more modern approach, and by 2018, Seth and Midnight Run band became official. Since then, the band has gained in popularity, and they have been busy…

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…