Join us for our 2nd annual Summer Recital at the Red Light Cafe! Featuring Guitar Shed students of all ages playing a wide variety of instruments and styles. Music begins at 5 pm with our youngest students performing first.

5 pm – Kids Set
7 pm – Teens and Adults Set

Free Raffle during setbreak!

$5 at the door for non-performers

Guitar Ensemble will perform at the end of the Kids Set and our Adult Band will perform at the end of the Teens and Adults Set. RSVP here.

Summer Recital

Big thanks to all of the performers and attendees at our first Student Showcase! Piano, guitar, violin, voice and ukulele were all represented along with a variety of age groups.

It takes courage to get up in front of an audience and perform. Several internal and external distractions have the ability to derail any performance. A musical mistake or error can be defined as a difference between the intended and actual musical outcome. How we deal with these unexpected outcomes is up to us. In my private lessons, a lot of what we work on is how to recover from these mishaps. How do you pick yourself up and move forward? Most of the time, the audience is unaware of a mistake and the only time they notice is when the performer makes it obvious.

To quote Zachary Poulter in Teaching Improv in your Jazz Ensemblethese “experiences prepare students for a world of increasing ambiguity by enabling them to confront and transcend uncertainty.” Every time you get up on stage to perform, you are one step closer to becoming a better musician and a better human. So keep learning, keep shedding and keep performing!

Thank you to our neighborhood pub, The Pullman for hosting!

 

Next weekend Lanta Gras will be back in Kirkwood for some Mardi Gras celebrations! Join us in supporting live music, music education and our community on Saturday, January 28 at noon. There will be a parade and post-parade festivities in downtown Kirkwood. Live bands and DJ’s from Scratch Academy will be providing the music!

Read more about Lanta Gras on their website here.
“Lanta Gras is a parade with purpose. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit with the mission to build community and opportunities for children through the common bond of music. Our goal is to establish a program offering brass and percussion musical instruction to middle school and high school children within the historic Atlanta neighborhoods of Kirkwood, East Lake and Edgewood. We hope to provide the instruments, mentorship and instruction to start local Brass Bands, highlighting our children at festivals, events and parades throughout Atlanta. We would love to walk down our streets and hear the echoes of trumpets playing!”

Click on the Facebook album below for pictures from our Winter Recital. All of the performers did a great job and the recording is available for download in our student portal. Enjoy!

Christmas came early for us this year at the Shed! Last week our friend, Tyler Petito (founder of Acorn Amplifiers) hand delivered a prototype of a new amp they are working on. Many of our students have Acorn Amplifiers stickers on their guitar cases, but what they might not know is that they are one of the premier amp builders in the country. They are located in nearby East Atlanta Village and also repair all of our amps here at the Shed.

As you can see, this amp is a beauty! The woodwork, grill cloth and logo make for a unique vintage vibe. With an open back design, this amp has plenty of space to fill up your room with soaring, tube amp tones. Look a little closer and you’ll see a penny embedded in the upper right corner of the amp from the year 2016 (the year the amp was made). Personal touches like this are what sets Tyler and co. apart. The vintage design is matched by classic tube amp tones that break up right where you want them to. We can’t stop playing this amp, and hope you enjoy playing it during your lessons here at the Shed as much as we do. This Acorn may be young, but it is maturing nicely.

 

This Saturday, I’ll be playing the music of The Band with my fellow Elegant Bachelors at Venkman’s in Old Fourth Ward. From time to time we will play an entire night of a band’s catalog. In the past we’ve played an entire night of music by The Beatles, The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers.

For me, it is always great to revisit these catalogs and absorb myself in the songs. Although I have played these songs many times, there is always something exposing itself for the first time. Whether it’s a new lyric, different chord or riff, or a new version that I haven’t heard before.

The Band are a musicians’ band. They were road tested, solid players with great vocals, musicianship and stage presence (some of the many reasons they made a great backing band for Bob Dylan). Other classic bands can be put in this category, Little Feat, Steely Dan, etc., but the Band possessed a rawness that is difficult to capture. They were Americana before it was a musical genre. How did this Canadian-American band so perfectly capture the essence of American music, blues, soul and country?

Much like The Band are a musicians’ band, Robbie Robertson is a guitarists’ guitarist. He has a unique style that is understated, tasteful, funky, sensitive and confident. Perhaps his most trademark technique is the use of pinch harmonics (picking the string with the thumb of the right hand immediately after the pick strikes the string). Add to that unapologetic bends, string squealing and chunky double stops and you’ve got a force to be reckoned with. He was a songwriter, singer and lead guitarist of one of the most influential rock and roll bands of the 20th century. Have a listen here for the band at their peak with some live recordings released a few years ago from 1971. They are not just any band, they are THE BAND.

 

In Cahoots