by Christine | Nov 15, 2019 | Welcome Column
How does one tell a real, but less than beautiful, family story in a way that allows just enough feeling to get the story out, reveals his attitude about the story, and then winds it up and makes it palatable to the real family members who will read it? ...
by Christine | Nov 13, 2011 | Welcome Column
How many times has this happened to you? You’re in a jam with mostly strangers and you start into a solo of a tune that you thought you knew cold. Your break starts out OK but along the way you lose the thread and your solo begins to fall apart. In the past...
by Christine | May 11, 2016 | Welcome Column
It’s a pretty common thing for folks to reminisce about a time when they lived in a town where they never locked their doors. It’s usually a prelude to a diatribe about how rotten people have become since those idyllic days. I suspect that the apparent safety of those...
by Christine | Feb 3, 2016 | Welcome Column
It’s not possible to lead a normal life in modern society (likely any society) without some trust of your fellow humans. It’s easy to forget that. I used to work at an Internet Service Provider in the late ‘90’s, (back in the dial-up days) and more than once, I had...
by Christine | Sep 29, 2009 | Welcome Column
It’s barely nine a.m. and the lounge is half full of tentative trade show goers and all night revilers carefully blinking good morning to one another. We are zombies, one and all, but instead of brains to devour we roam halls and passages of the hotel in search...
by Christine | Mar 28, 2018 | Welcome Column
Playing music is tough, and there are so many things to keep track of. But being in tune (especially for fretted strings instruments) is something you should be able to control. Back in the days before inexpensive tuners, it was tougher. You had a pitch fork, or pitch...
by Christine | Feb 14, 2010 | Welcome Column
Be nobody’s darling but mine love, Be honest, be faithful and kind, And promise me that you will ever, Be nobody’s darling but mine. Yes folks, today is a day for love songs. Play and sing a few of your own favorites today for that special someone who plays the...
by Christine | Oct 3, 2013 | Welcome Column
Is it just me or does this happen to everyone? A jam is just starting and someone calls a song and a key. There is a kick and the music starts to flow but right away something is off. I start checking my left hand position, putting my ear next to the strings, looking...
by Christine | Nov 1, 2018 | Welcome Column
Recently I had a major tuner crisis. My last Intellitouch PT-10 just stopped functioning. It wasn’t a battery problem. It just wouldn’t turn on at all. I used to have four of them a couple of months back but all of them self destructed or just plain disappeared....
by Christine | Nov 18, 2017 | Welcome Column
On the year of my twelfth Thanksgiving I lived the rural life on a large and wild chunk of property in the Sierra foothills. We lived atop a huge meadow which was completely surrounded by mixed conifer forest. Our ranch lay at the end of a two-mile patchwork of forest...
