I don’t know if you participate in the relatively new Black Friday ritual or not, but if so, I hope you found what you were looking for last weekend, and more importantly, I hope you avoided any fatal trampling incidents.
Chris Jones
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Giving Thanks for Bluegrass Blessings
We’re entering the long weekend of Thanksgiving today, which is, if you look on the positive side, a time of feasting on turkey and pumpkin pie, reuniting with family, happily braving the malls with other bargain-hunting Christmas shoppers, and giving
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Twitter truths and Facebook factuality
Because our touring season is winding down for 2013, and Thanksgiving is upon us, I wanted to open on a personal note: I feel grateful for the fact that this past year was the best and most rewarding year our
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Pocket phrase book for studio musicians
We just got through a two-part series on studio psychology, and the role of the engineer and producer in it, touching briefly on whether it’s better to eat regular or thin crust pizza during a recording session. I thought we
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Engineer reach down and pull the slider
First of all, I should apologize for being a day late with this. Even though we gained an hour over the weekend when we returned to Standard Time, I seem to have lost a whole day in the process. It’s
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Oozing tension and other studio tips
Going into the studio to record is something that all professional and semi-professional (and in some cases, complete amateur) musicians will do at some point in their careers, usually early and often. The studio, as anyone with experience can tell you,
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By the Mark… Wahlberg
Often when I have been on the receiving end of interview questions, and particularly when the interviewers are from outside the bluegrass community, I’ll get a question about the growth of bluegrass music and the general level of interest in
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Merch Table Etiquette and Avian Scat
A while back, I wrote here about bluegrass artists’ accessibility to fans, and about some of the interesting things people say to artists at their merchandise tables. Those that aren’t used to approaching people they don’t know and criticizing their work,
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Irony, schmirony… free speech in bluegrass
Well, if you’ve followed Bluegrass Today at all in the last week, you know there really is something more newsworthy and controversial than a government shutdown. It turns out to be the fact that a bluegrass artist decided to stop
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Really? I thought they had moved last year
Generally, when I write these around the week of the IBMA World of Bluegrass, I like to keep them extremely short, to match the nights of sleep I’ve had, and the attention span I have as a result. I guess that