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Click
on Links below to find resources about many good things.
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Banjo Teachers
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Instrument Repair
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Banjo Makers and Shops
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Recording Equipment
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Other Organizations
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Hear the Music
¯Other
Resources
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Banjo & Fiddle Teachers & Players That
Have Guided One or More of Us
#Back |
Brooke Parkhurst, Banjo Teacher
Flint Hill, VA
www.tinsmith.org
banjowitch@hotmail.com
Travels to DC area to teach
Bacon |
Diane Jones, Banjo Teacher
www.reedisland.com
dbjones@dmv.com |
Cathy Fink, Banjo Teacher
Community Music
www.cathymarcy.com/
info@cathymarcy.com
Teaches workshops
Tubaphone |
Lea Coryell, Banjo Teacher
www.shenandoahacoustics.com/coryell/
lcor@loc.gov
banjo teacher
Teaches individuals and Worshops
Bart Reiter with internal resonator and bacon tone ring |
Bruce Hutton, Banjo Teacher
Mt. Ranier, MD
hutton@fsgw.org
301-779-5901 |
Bobbi Geyer, Banjo Teacher
Manassas, VA
www.FifthStringDesigns.com
banjoteacher@comcast.net
Bobbi teaches both clawhammer and 3 finger (Scruggs style), writes for Banjo
Newsletter, and designs and maintains a number of banjo related websites.
She plays (among others) her Stelling Butterfly. |
Ken Perlman, Banjo Teacher
Leominster MA
www.kenperlman.com
KenPerlman@aol.com
Teaches workshops
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Bob Carlin, Banjo Teacher
Lexington, NC
www.cartunesrecordings.com
carlin@cartunesrecordings.com
Teaches workshops
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Wendy Morrison, Banjo Teacher
www.klezmusic.com/policy.html
wendy@klezmusic.com |
Andrea Hoag, Fiddle Teacher
Takoma Park, MD
www.andreahoag.com
andrea@andreahoag.com
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Alan Jabbour, Fiddler
Washington, DC
www.alanjabbour.com
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| Banjo
Shops & Makers
#Back |
Turtle Hill Banjo Co
David E. Schenkman
Bryantown, MD
www.turtlehillbanjo.com
info@turtlehillbanjo.com
In our area, you really can't get much better
then Turtle Hill in living out your banjo fantasies. Dave is
extraordinarily helpful and gracious to new banjo players (and shoppers) and
he has a large stock of open backs available -- old and new. Go see
him! |
Zepp Country Music
www.zeppmusic.com
I love this website (it's also a North Carolinian bricks & mortar store).
Donald Zepp has sound files for the many banjos, both old and new, that he
offers for sale. He's a wonderful clawhammer player so, not only does
it make internet banjo shopping fun, it's also a good resource when you are
learning tunes or just want to listen to good music. Check it out.
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Kevin Enoch, Banjo Maker
www.enochbanjos.com
kevin@enochbanjos.com |
Mike Ramsey, Banjo Maker
Appomattox, VA
www.ramseybanjos.com
banjoramse@aol.com |
George Wunderlich, Minstrel Banjo Maker
Myersville, MD
www.wunderbanjo.com
george@wunderbanjo.com |
Ralph Geiger, Banjo Maker
Elkton, FL
http://geigerbanjo.com
ralph@geigerbanjo.com |
The Music Store
14865 Spotswood Tr.
Ruckersville, VA 22968 |
| Equipment to
Record Workshops and Jams
#Back |
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Audio
Field Recording Equipment Guide
This is a wonderful page in the Vermont Folklife Center
website. Take a look at this page before you shop, if your looking to
upgrade your recording equipment for all those banjo workshops and sessions. |
Mini-Disks by Paul Dubois
About three years ago I bought a Sharp
MT877 minidisc recorder for a workshop with Dwight Diller. I'm not an
audiophile but I did do a little research on the internet and chose the
minidisc format for a few reasons:
- recording quality is very high
- the recorder is small and unobtrusive (about 3"x3"x3/4") - the discs are
relatively inexpensive (around $1.50 each) - the discs can be rerecorded
many times over
- the 80 minute discs can be recorded on at LP2 (half) speed with no audible
loss of fidelity, which means 2 hours & 40 minutes recording time - battery
life ranges from 6-15 hours recording or 12-28 hours playback depending upon
use of the AA batterypack.
I eventually bought a stereo clip-on microphone from Radio Shack for about
$40 which works suprisingly well. Its frequency response is 30-18,000Hz,
which means that it does a better job of picking up bass response. I had
previously used a Sony mic with clear but thin results. This one sounds
better.
The downside of all this convenience is price. I paid close to $300 for mine
back in 2002, but I haven't priced them recently.
One important note - I chose my Sharp model because I could adjust the mic
levels while it was recording. Some of the Sonys made you get out of
recording mode to adjust the volume. I'm not sure if this has changed since,
but you really don't want to miss anything while you're fooling around with
your recorder.
Finally, though some object to the fact that minidisc recorders don't have a
digital signal out capacity, for my live recordings I've never missed it. I
try to get the best possible sound using volume levels and mic positioning.
Then I play the recording into my old mac, using "CD Spindoctor" and "Toast"
to burn it onto a cd for posterity. It's also easy to record practice
sessions to really hear yourself play. I also gave it a workout at the 2003
Folklife Festival Appalachian music sessions.
This may be too much information, but please feel free to ask any followup
questions. I'm pretty happy with my setup. |
I-Pod by Rosemarie Nielsen
The first thing to know about the iPod
is that it’ll work most simply with a Mac or with Windows XP, with which it
can run the iTunes software. I think there are ways to make it work with
earlier versions of Windows using something called Music Match Jukebox,
which are outlined in the Missing Manual for the iPod book (I think that the
Missing Manual is available at Borders Books. My copy’s a loaner, but check
with me if you buy an iPod and if I’ve still got it I’ll lend it to you.) It
also helps if you have a FireWire connection or a high-speed USB port.
I have the 20 gigabyte iPod. There’s a 40 gigabyte one available, but at
present the extra memory adds an extra $100 to the cost. Dan and I have
loaded all our rock, oldtime, and bluegrass music and have about 4,000 songs
on almost 9 gigabytes. That’s left no room for the classical music or
Broadway shows. The solution (though I haven’t done it yet) is to load
everything onto the PC and then choose what music downloads to the iPod.
It takes some time to import pre-recorded CDs into iTunes, and much much
longer to import CDs I’ve made from analog sources, but once you begin
importing you do not have to sit at the computer and attend to it. The names
of tunes and albums are available online for most pre-recorded CDs, even
many banjo instructional CDs, and iTunes goes online and gets the
information for you. Sometimes, though, the labels are not correct! For
example, on one of Diane’s CDs the names of two tunes were swapped. If you
discover something like this, it’s possible to correct it in your library.
When there’s no songlist available, you can enter the info song by song and
there are limited but useful ways to label sets of songs.
We’re thinking we’ll need to buy a bigger hard drive for the PC to store
this massive amount of music, because we’ve used up most of the free space
on Ellie’s computer (she’s got the only XP machine in the house.) At one
point, we’d slowed her machine down to a crawl and had to defragment the
hard disk.
Now, for recording: when Dan told the Apple advisor what I wanted to do, he
was told to buy a Belkin microphone adapter. It fits into the headphone and
remote jacks on the top of the iPod, and makes room for a mic jack and a
headphone jack in case you want to monitor what you’re recording. Then he
bought a pretty good mic (one that does NOT have batteries of its own.) When
you add the mic adapter, the iPod reveals menus having to do with “voice
memos”. The menus guide you through the steps to recording. The voice memos
are stored with only the date and time as identifiers (the iPod has a clock
built in.) When you link the iPod to the PC, the voice memos are downloaded
to iTunes (the iPod jukebox software) where you can give them names and add
other info like who’s performing. Once they’re renamed, they become part of
your music library just like any other song/tune.
There are smaller devices that have the mic and adapter combined, which are
less cumbersome than my setup, but Dan was told that the sound quality would
not be as good.
I don’t know that much about editing, but you can edit out material at the
beginning or end of a song pretty simply. Each bit of recording has “info”
that you can modify in a set of menus. You can specify where in the
recording you want to begin and end when you play it. So if someone’s opened
a song with an annoying joke, or maybe someone’s tuning as the song begins,
you don’t have to listen to that over and over. There’s a graphic equalizer
that you can set for each song, though I haven’t reached that level of
refinement yet. I’m assuming it’s possible to cut a song into two (I always
forget to turn the recorder off between songs), but I haven’t figured out
how to do it yet.
Another nice feature is that you can adjust the sound level for each song. I
had some things I’d taped off old scratchy records that were recorded at too
low a sound level to hear. I was able to boost the volume in the “info”
menus so that the songs were useful.
There is more sophisticated editing software out there, including some I saw
at the Apple Store, but I haven’t felt the need for it yet.
Once you’ve loaded the iPod with your recordings and pre-recorded CDs, you
can burn CDs (I’m assuming that most XP machines come with a burner.) That’s
pretty fast and quite easy—you just create a playlist and start the burner
using iTunes. The software for printing out the lists of the songs is a bit
of a pain, but I think I just need to learn more about it.
When you buy your iPod, you’ll be offered expensive external speakers ($160
to $360) that come with an iPod dock. But I found speakers at Radio Shack
for $10 that sound pretty good to me.
There are some other gadgets that can make your iPod more useful. The sound
buds (they fit inside your ear) that come with the iPod sound fantastic, but
after a while they make my ears sore! I reverted to using some old
headphones instead. You can play your iPod on your car radio in a couple of
different ways. We’re using an old cassette-type adaptor that came with a
portable CD player. You can also buy an Apple product (I don’t recall its
name) that beams the music to your radio on an FM frequency. My
brother-in-law likes that. You can also charge your iPod with the cigarette
lighter in your car if you buy an adapter. There’s also a portable battery
that may be necessary if you’re recording over a long day. Recording seems
to run the battery down pretty quickly.
My next purchase will be the device (again, I’ve forgotten its name but it’s
at the Apple store) that will connect a turntable or tape deck to the PC and
let me put all my old LPs and tapes into iTunes. This device is pretty
cheap—it’s about $35.
I guess the best thing for me has been how quickly I can turn recordings of
banjo get-togethers into music I can listen to and share. Working from tapes
took forever, and the end results were full of tape noise. I also love
having all my banjo music at my fingertips! I hope this is useful!
Let me know if you have other questions. |
| Hear
the Music
#Back |
| OLD TIME JAM with Hubie King at
www.bluegrasscountry.org.
Mondays at 6 pm and repeated on Thursday morning at 6 am. You can listen on
hi-def radio or listen online. Tunes, interviews, recorded music, live
music. |
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Music in the Digital Library of Appalachia
As quoted from the site ... "DLA music entries are derived from
non-commercial sound recordings that document much of Appalachian music's
geographic, ethnic, vocal, and instrumental diversity. The several thousand
presently available provide an unprecedented resource for study of
repertoire, technique, lore, and the musical interchanges among the region's
traditional musicians, many of who are no longer living." |
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The Library of Congress's site
Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier ~ The Henry Reed Collection is a
"multi-format ethnographic field collection of traditional fiddle tunes
performed by Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia. Recorded by folklorist
Alan Jabbour in 1966-67, when Reed was over eighty years old, the tunes
represent the music and evoke the history and spirit of Virginia's
Appalachian frontier." |
www.sugarinthegourd.com
Oldtime Internet Radio
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http://fiddlejammer.blogspot.com
Terri Lukačko has a great blog dedicated to
our kind of music. Click on Festival Recordings and you will find
recordings of tunes played at various jams. |
www.hober.com
Eclectic Internet Radio from Takoma Park~includes lots of trad music
(Brooke and Andrea are played quite often) |
Field Recorders'
Collective
Dedicated to release of materials (music and photographs) from private
collections.
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