Bluegrass Jam Along Bluegrass Jam Along

My guest this week is Alister Atkin of Atkin Guitars.I've been following Atkin's progress for a few years now and have been blown away by the quality of guitars they're producing. They combine some cutting edge techniques with a bespoke approach, to bring out the uniqueness of every guitar they make. As Alister puts it: 'We're all about getting the feel and the sound of the instrument, and the aura of a great instrument.'We talk about some of these processes, including baking wood, freezing g...

Last week we lost Happy Traum, one of the shining lights of acoustic music for over half a century.It’s hard to fully grasp, in our online world where everything is right there whenever we need it, just what an enormous contribution Happy and the Homespun team made to helping people learn roots and acoustic music.I was lucky enough to get to chat to Happy a couple of times for the podcast, and he spoke about how strongly he felt that their role was to document, as well as teach. Watching the ...

Welcome to this week’s Bluegrass Briefing, a weekly series of episodes taking a look at what’s going on in the world of bluegrass.Here are the links to stuff mentioned in this episode.News and Announcements (Church Street News)IBMA award nomineesReleases (The Grass is New)David Grisman & the Rounder Album Band - Live at Grass ValleyThe Grass is (mostly) New 2024 playlistOther bitsSign up for emails https://bluegrassjamalong.com/contact/The Grass is (mostly) New 2024 playlistFull list of i...

My guest this week is Roger Siminoff. Not only is Roger an authority on instrument making, the physics of music and tap tuning, he's also an expert on the life and work of Lloyd Loar.Loar worked at Gibson in the early 1920s and oversaw the production of some truly remarkable, game changing instruments - most notably the F5 mandolin, which went on to become an integral part of bluegrass music and shape how we see mandolins for the next 100 years.We talked about Lloyd Loar's background, why his...

Welcome to this week’s Bluegrass Briefing, a weekly series of episodes taking a look at what’s going on in the world of bluegrass.Here are the links to stuff mentioned in this episode.News and Announcements (Church Street News)IBMA Black String Band SymposiumVolunteer at IBMAEmail volunteer@ibma.org for more infoReleases (The Grass is New)The Grass is (mostly) New 2024 playlistScroll on BuddyEast Nash Grass at DelFestTony Rice Native American vinyl reissueOther bitsSign up for emails https://...

My guest on the podcast this week is Chris Eldridge, guitarist with Punch Brothers and Mighty Poplar.Chris is not only one of my favourite guitarists, he's also one of my favourite people I've had on as a guest, so I'm delighted to welcome him back to Bluegrass Jam Along to celebrate the podcast's 400th episode.In this special episode we're chatting about Bela Fleck's ground breaking record Drive. It's a record that's really important to Chris, and also played a key role in the early days of ...