clawhammer.neocities.org
Playing Since: 1989
Interests:
[Jamming] [Socializing] [Helping]
Gender: Male
My Instruments:
Gold Tone CC100-OTW
Favorite Bands/Musicians:
Tune Dogs (Georgia, USA).
Classified Rating: not rated
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Profile Info:
Visible to: Public
Created 10/20/2007
Last Visit 10/18/2020
I became interested in old time music when I met two frailers, Andrew Martyn (who sadly passed away recently) and Vic Wilcox, in Liverpool, England in the late 1980s. Their playing inspired me to want to learn the banjo. I played the guitar at the time and we formed a loose-knit band for a while--enough time for me to buy a banjo and pick up the basics of frailing from them. Ken Perlman's clawhammer tutor book was also a great help developing my playing.
After a few years, some of the band members moved away from Liverpool for various family and job reasons. And we are now widely dispersed. However, we did make a recording of the tunes we played before we parted. A few years after the recording session, we put the recordings on the Web as mp3s--after getting the original tracks from recording master tape via the recording engineer Mike Cooper. We needed a name to identify ourselves and adopted the title: Shake that Little Foot String Band since that was the title of the analogue tape we made from the recording. The tracks are available at:
https://archive.org/details/Shake_that_Little_Foot
Since then, I have been playing the banjo on my own for some years and I am looking for inspiration and some new tunes to learn and different ways of playing the tunes I already know. I have a circle of musician friends and we get together every so often for music sessions.
I have visited various Old Time/Bluegrass Festivals: Edale, Ironbridge and Conwy. That's where I heard just how good old time string bands can sound.
I also play the mandolin and very occasionally the fiddle (badly!).
I started out playing the nylon strung classical guitar in my late teens, working my way through Frederick M Noad's two volume classical guitar tutor book "Solo Guitar Playing".
In the mid-80s, I was part of a band called "Andes" in Liverpool which was made up of a mixture of British and Chilean musicians. We played Andean musical instruments (charango, pan pipes, quena, bombo) and sang songs in Spanish from the Chilean Canto Nuevo genre initiated by Violeta Para as well as traditional Andean Amerindian instrumental music. We played gigs throughout North West England and in Merseyside Mexican restaurants.
Since the early 90s, I have been around the traditional Irish music scene in Manchester for some years now.
My banjo website is at:
https://clawhammer.neocities.org/
All my audio, video files and tablatures have a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Details here.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
'Idiots And Insane Persons' 53 min
