Updated: 23 April 2008

If you’ve been wondering about the status of our group classes, I’m happy to announce that we will be starting up our music school program again this fall.  In our July/August newsletter, I’ll introduce you to our new school director and give you an idea what’s coming up.  In the meantime, we’ve got some great workshops taking place on Saturday, May 31 that you don’t want to miss. 

As we did last year, we’re having a “workshops day” where we’ll offer multiple workshops during two back-to-back sessions.  This year we’ve planned workshops on home recording, fingerstyle guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bass as well as swing guitar style and Maybelle Carter guitar style.  Grammy winner and 2006 International Fingerstyle Guitar champion Doug Smith is just one of the top-notch instructors we’ve lined up.  Other instructors are Raul Reynoso, Matt Flinner, Randy Elmore, Cathy Camp-Davidson, Carol McComb and our own Charlie Hall.  Instructor bios and workshop descriptions can be found here.

Open stage changes:  We’ve been hearing from many of you that the open stage portion of our 2nd & 4th Friday night events has been running too long.  Indeed, our goal is that the open stage portion of the evening last for 1 hour.  Until recently, open stage acts were allowed to play 5 songs or 20 minutes.  We certainly like to hear the story behind a song but with talking, encores, and 2 stage changes we were regularly running 30 minutes over the time allotted for this part of the evening.  This if course, causes the feature act to start later and for the event to end later.

The board considered 2 options; keep 3 acts and shorten each set to 4 songs or allow only 2 acts and keep the 5 song limit.  Four weeks ago, we instituted the first option.  So far, it’s been working out well.  We’ve been able to start the feature act by 8:30pm and end the evening at a reasonable time.

Something else we’ve been hearing is that many of you miss the jams that used to take place at our Friday open stage events.  Jamming after the feature act finishes would require the jammers to do the cleanup and lockup which just isn’t practical.  Jamming before the open stages interferes with the setup and sound checks. However, there is a large deck behind the building where jams could take place and not interfere with the work inside.  So let’s jam!  See page 10 for more information.

Feel free to send an email to feedback@blackroseacoustic.org and let us know what you think of our programs.  We welcome your comments.

Jeff Smith