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Looking forward to meeting all of you!

Thanks! -- btw, I'll have both of my Brian Dean mandolins, the 8-string and the 10-string, and of course all are welcome to play a few notes on it if they like ;)

"Very small traces" is accurate! As you know, I've never been terribly interested in remaining faithful to the source material I'm making an arrangement of. I just take the bits I need ;)

Here's a little arrangement of James P. Johnson's 'You Gotta Be Modernistic' for mandolin and violin, with fellow Mannes faculty member Miranda Cuckson playing quite brilliantly. I did it recently...

I used the 8-string Brian Dean GC when we did this with MTT at New World Center, and it filled it just fine. This time I'll be using the 10-string which is even louder, so I think we'll be ok ;)

Thanks!

Sorry, won't be coming as far south as San Diego this trip, there just isn't enough time! Though I have in the past, and I love it down there. Would love to make it a destination next time ;)

Hey everyone, I'll be in San Francisco in early May to play with the Symphony a bit, and my girl Sara will be with me. She's the fiddle player in Esperanza Spaulding's band, and was recently named...

Tom Crandall at Umanov, Mamie Minch at Retrofret, and Yuriy Kovalev at Rudy's repair shop are the three best in the city. Bob Jones is also excellent, but he's sometimes tough to get a hold of. Tom...

Me and Bryan Dunn do John Prine's "Christmas in Prison".

http://www.amazon.com/Christmas-in-Prison/dp/B006NGBEU0

I'd never used them until Brian sent this instrument to me with them on. I use GHS S&S for the 8-string and they sound wonderful and play well in tune -- for some reason on this instrument, they're...

Just tried the GHS and .49s, and sure enough, they're a bit flabby. Switching to D'Addario flat-tops, .11-.56.

Yes, there's a bit of verb on the audio in that recording. There's no EQ, however, the tone is as it comes -- or, as good as I could approximate it in my meager home studio.

I don't know what strings are on it, but they're definitely not the GHS/D'ad combo I plan to use. I think she's essentially the same body shape and size as the 8-string, the major difference being...

14.25", same as my 8-string. I'm going to put GHS Silk & Steel EADG on it with a D'addario mandola C, for a total gauge set of 011 016 026W 040W and 049W. The C isn't floppy at all, even with the...

The top is walnut, sides/false back are maple, and the true back is spruce. For more questions, you should ask Brian, he's at http://www.labraid.ca, some of the technical things go a bit over my head...

Here's a few pics and a video of Brian Dean's new 10-string Grand Concert:

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Hi there, mandoleers! Specifically, Chicago-based mandoleers. I'll be playing a few notes with your lovely symphony, but they don't have accommodations for visiting artists, which I'm not really,...

A great man, who happened to be a great mandolinist. I'm shocked... devastating news. There are no words for how great a loss to the musical community as a whole this is. Please keep posting with...

It should be noted that dropping all the text into html, adding all the links, and making the layout look all nice and pretty like it does is a fairly massive job, so save some of those kudos for...

Guitarists definitely utilize the open strings much more than fiddlers -- maybe it's just that the open E on the Grand Concert is so muscular... I don't have any such qualms about any of the other...

I tried that -- never liked that open string in there, even with a mandolin with a zero fret. Man, if you can get that second fingering, you've got way bigger hands than me!

Here's Southern Winds...

When I was 16 I was at a summer music academy with a guy named Jason DePue, who's now a violinist in the Philly Orchestra. He was really, really good even then, and I used to hang out outside his...

Yeah, pretty much Jim, only way more so on mandolin. There's things that are easier on mandolin though -- for instance, on violin, you try to shift on bow changes wherever possible so you don't hear...

Improvised Poem isn't really all that hard in a way, because it's actually written very 'mandolinistically'. The trick is that when you're learning it, there's a lot of string crossing that you have...