The Glory-Beaming Banjo

Last week I had to go out of town for work. I couldn't take my banjo and fiddle, which meant I had to interrupt my daily playing streak . As you may recall, I started tracking consecutive days playing last year as a way to stoke enthusiasm and boost my overall practice time. My longest streak was 86 days on banjo and 89 days on fiddle, and then I finished off 2018 with a 50-day streak . I've been able to keep that streak going into 2019. It just so happens that my final day of playing before jumping on a jet to Texas was the 50th day of the year. It's nice to have a nice, round number as a new milestone. I restarted my streak at the fourth annual Lake Erie Folk Festival . While I didn't participate in as much jamming as in past years, the event provided plenty of entertainment. The Old-Time Banjo Summit delivered many amusing anecdotes from banjo luminaries Richie Stearns, Lukas Pool, Doug Unger and Mark Olitsky. I wish I would have taken my nice camera to d...

The fourth annual  Lake Erie Folk Festival is coming up this weekend, and there’s plenty to enjoy for us banjo nerds.  First and foremost is the Old-Time Banjo Summit at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 23, featuring such five-string luminaries as Mark Olitsky, Doug Unger, Richie Stearns and Lukas Pool. These four banjo masters will compare their banjo playing styles. Longtime readers of the Glory-Beaming Banjo may already be familiar with Olitsky, who was featured in a two-part feature on this site in 2011. Click the links to check out Part 1 and Part 2 . Unger is known for his brilliant banjo building , but he is also an accomplished player with a sparse style. I once heard him describe his style as a series of runs, and hearing that opened up my thinking on how to play in a jam when I don’t necessarily know the tunes. Stearns is a virtuoso based in Ithaca, New York, known for his playing in the Horse Flies, the Evil City String Band and many others. Currently, he tours wi...

Welcome back to our monthly series about the now-defunct Kent State Folk Festival. Click here if you missed the first installment. I was originally going to provide an early history of the festival this month, but figured I'd take a different approach and recall one specific year that was ... alarming . I finally got around to reading Walt Koken's enjoyable memoir, Fire on the Mountain: An American Odyssey , published in 2017. Here's a quick review: It's a fast and interesting read, but he could have used a better editor. There were a number of spelling and grammar mistakes that, as a professional language-type, were hard for me to ignore. I suppose that's the challenge with self-published books. However, the stories about Koken's early days as a musician, the forming of the Highwoods Stringband and their rambling career provided great insights and plenty of entertainment. I have to thank Lynn Frederick for passing along the book to me. But let's get ba...

One of my goals for 2019 is to get back to recording my own playing. Recording yourself is a common suggestion for improving musicianship, but it's something I've gotten away from in the last couple years. The last time I recorded myself was in 2017. I've had this Zoom H2 digital recorder since about 2010, but it has lain unused for the last few years as my phone's voice recorder became my gear of choice. The results were fine, but limited. The Zoom H2 has far better dynamic range, and way more storage capacity. The biggest benefit is I can set it and (try to) forget it. Last week, I dusted off my H2 and recorded a portion of my practice session, running through 10 tunes as a baseline to see where I stand for 2019 and pinpoint areas for improvement. Upon listening to the results, my immediate impression was I tend to play too fast, which I suspect led to my other two problems: muddy phrasing and uneven rhythm. My intonation seemed OK for the most part, except ...

Once upon a time, there was a robust folk festival on the campus of Kent State University, in my hometown of Kent, Ohio. I remember going as a kid, and at least once for a school field trip. There were concerts and workshops devoted to all strains of folk music in America and abroad. That was my first exposure to the  Kent State Folk Festival . My fondest memories of the event came much later. I started playing the banjo in 2008, but didn't start focusing on old-time music until 2009. That year, I learned there was a clawhammer banjo workshop in my old hometown at my alma mater by some guy named Mark Olitsky . So I went. And my jaw fell out of my face and hit the ground with a thud of realization that I had A LOT to learn about playing the banjo. The next year, I returned to the Kent State Folk Festival to attend Olitsky's workshop again. By then, I had swapped my resonator banjo for an open-back built by a local maker and had just started attending a local old-time s...