Memorial Day saw a for-real live bluegrass concert at the Big Red Barn in Valley Center. Featuring top flight national band Nu Blu, the event was open to the public. Beyond that, Duck Foot Brewery has re-started its Sunday bluegrass jam sessions, our first campout has taken place, the Red Barn has more events booked […]
Having gone over the super nerdy essentials of how a variety of compressors work and the differences between the four basic types (FET, VCA, Optical, and Variable-Mu) last month, I thought I would share with you a half-dozen or so favorites from the multitude in my current arsenal. For the sake of brevity, I will […]
I’m in the dark. A masked woman playing a vibraphone with bows as though it were a stringed instrument appears before me. She drags the bows down the metal bars like driving stakes through the heart of a vampire. She pulls an ethereal, shimmering moan from the instrument. Her image doubles as faces, feet, flowers, […]
Former San Diegan John Mailander has relocated to Nashville, and since his last solo album in 2019 he has put together a band, John Mailander’s Forecast. Look Closer is the full-length debut by the fiddle specialist and multi-instrumentalist as a bandleader. The music on the six tracks, four of them Mailander compositions, is drawn from […]
John Batdorf’s latest is a six-song EP, An Extraordinary Ordinary Life. The pop/soft-rock specialist is certainly prolific in his recorded output—this follows on the heels of his previous 2020 release, Last Summer. Whether solo or teamed with other artists like James Lee Stanley and Michael McLean, he has established himself as a known quantity whose […]
It’s hard to imagine a world without Zak Nilsson. Then again, it is hard to lose anyone who embodied so many virtues as this gentle friend. He loved life with good humor and common sense. He walked through his own elusive moments with humility and kindness. He walked in the footsteps of famous people beginning […]
Hello Troubadourians! Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of YouTube reviews of so-called budget guitars—guitars starting from less that $200 in some cases, to under $400—that are receiving rave reviews. I won’t name the brands but you can find them on several YouTube channels and it made me think about what makes a guitar “good” these […]
This assured and rocking sophomore effort from San Diego’s Sea Monks shows just how far the family band has progressed since their first release, Gasoline, in 2019. Digitally released on April 1, 2021 (no joke!), the new Sea Monks effort is more assured and muscular, with more original tunes, fewer covers, and deeper lyrics. The […]
