Not that it should matter, really, because I actually play banjo and don’t NEED MIDI to get banjo tracks. But I do use MIDI sequencers to work up demos, backing tracks for church “specials,” and when working up arrangements. I also use MIDI sequencers when creating tabs and sample half-speed…
If you’re in the habit of checking IP addresses for sites you log onto, you’ll know we’ve moved this web site. Part of a long, complicated, and expensive series of migrations and other changes forced on me and my poor website readers over the last 18 months by a domain…
This is a plea to anyone who has ever created a substantial online resource to make provisions for keeping the resource available should anything prevent you from continuing its maintenance. I initially posted this on another web page in 2010, but three useful folk music resources I had linked to…
This is an account of two well-used student tenor banjos I recently adopted for a demonstration, plus an account of how I put them to use in a workshop at a local festival. It’s provided here as a background to anyone considering a similar experiment with 4-strings, and for your…
By now, many of you realize that I operate over a dozen web pages, some as much as 21 years old. All of them have contact pages for e-mailing me directly from the site, and several have discussion forums. Yes, I get a lot of spam, but I try to…
Although this question is a “no-brainer” for many Christian musicians, many others struggle with it, especially folks who came up through legalistic systems that label anything that isn’t distinctly ”Christian” as “of the devil.” I don’t have a “one-size-fits-all” answer to that question, but I have some observations and experiences…
When I was a young folk-singer, rocker, and Jesus musician (consecutively, not concurrently), there were always place to play, if you just had the nerve to pick up the phone and to send out press kits. Then, for about twenty-five years, the number of places to play seemed to be…
If you’re not a Christian, or not interested in such things, feel free to skip this post. It’s actually a link to an article on our SchoolOfTheRock.com page – this is just an introduction. Back in the early 1970s when I was a young Christian trying to find God’s will…
Long before I started this blog (about music), I had a page on a Christmas site listing “musings,” which are short articles about our personal reactions to Christmas and related topics. If you’re in the mode for some Christmas readings, check out our FamilyChristmasOnline Musings page. Some musings that I…
When I turned 59, a company I worked for in the 1980s started trying to “buy me out” of the itty bitty pension I accumulated between 1981 and 1984. I explained to the “financial counselor” who kept calling me that I had “done the math” and the value of the…
