Paul Race Music: Home Page
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Paul Race loves and plays most kinds of music, but he is especially fond of acoustic-based and traditional styles. If that makes you think of artists like Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Jim Croce, and Rich Mullins, you're on the right track. Since the 1960s, Paul has been performing original songs in just about any kind of performance situation you can imagine - coffeehouses, festivals, churches, schools, nightclubs, camps, street fairs - you name it.
If you check out Paul's online resources, you'll notice that Paul spends a lot of time these days helping other musicians make good choices and find the resources they need, especially musicians who are interested in acoustic or traditional music. For example the CreekDontRise.com acoustic instrument pages provide a lot of background on various kinds and uses of acoustic instruments. Paul's RiverboatMusic.com buyers' guides attempt to sort out the hype from the facts about acoustic instrument purchases. But Paul also keeps his hand in by continuing to write new songs, learning (and writing about) new instruments, and performing when opportunities arise.
BTW, we've gotten some questions about the little album cover thumbnail to the right of Paul's photo above. There's more information about the recordings it represents in our blog "About the song collection 'At the Heart of My Heart Was the Music'"
Thanks, and God bless,
Paul Race
CreekDontRise.com - Heartland history and music
SchoolOfTheRock.com - Jesus Music and saxophones
ClassicTrainSongs.com - Traditional songs about trains
RiverboatMusic.com - Buyers' guides for acoustic instruments.
PaulRaceMusic.com - This page, actually
The Ghost of Tom Joad . . . Orphan Web Pages
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…
Trial Balloon: Re-Posting Mickey Cochran’s Free 5-String Lessons
Mitchell “Mickey” Cochran loved traditional acoustic music. So much so that when he left a successful career as a graphic artist and web programmer, he started his own online music store, complete with free online lessons for many instruments, including 5-string banjo, mandolin, and Appalachian dulcimer. Years ago, I archived…
Shun the Frumious Banjitar
What’s in a Name? Sometimes shaming and resentment. This includes the name “banjitar,” which certain musicians have used to stress that 6-string banjo players aren’t real banjo players, but rather guitar players who want to play banjo without learning anything. The name needs to be retired. For one thing, the…
The Two Tenors
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…
The Value of Asynchronous Communication, or Don’t Call My Home.
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…
About Banjo Choices – Event
If you’ve visited my Folk- and Acoustic-focused web page CreekDontRise.com, you probably know that I have a lot of resources for helping people choose the most appropriate banjo for them. On August 13, I’m scheduled to do a short workshop on that topic at a local Folk, Acoustic, and Indie…
About the song collection “At the Heart of My Heart Was the Music”
Recently I tried to add some tracks to my home page and the software insisted I include a thumbnail of an album cover. I used the only one that I have commercially available at this time, which includes a few tracks that actually date back to the late 1990s. Click…
My New Travel Guitar is a Banjo
I don’t need a travel guitar to sit around campfires or to take white water rafting, only to keep in practice when I’m away from home. I have recently adopted a reworked cheap 6-string banjo as my current “travel guitar,” because – in spite of drawbacks that include a Harmony-style…
Locking Into a Digital Recording Platform in a Good Way
I’ve used Cakewalk/12-Tone products since I had my first 8-bit MS-DOS PC, and I’ve gradually upgraded to their top-of-the line, although I have to confess that I haven’t even used every annual upgrade, because sometimes what changed the most was features I didn’t use anyway. Now that I’ve been thinking…
The Goodtimes Just Keep Getting Better!
I now have more banjos that I can possibly justify, except by selling off a couple. The most recent addition is a Goodtime Artisan, chosen for all the wonderful playability and quality it shares with my bass-line Goodtime, and also because of upgrades, including a more traditional finish, planetary tuners,…