Tangier Sound

Steve in the UK wrote:

Hi Patrick! Hope you’re well mate! Steve here over in the UK, i sent you an email a week or so back and just wanted to thankyou for your assistnace i bought myself a new Goldtone CB-100 the other day and feel i am really starting to make progress now. I just posted a short video on youtube. If you get time after your little “drive” go have a look and see what you think. i know its nothing amazing but i am really proud

And then he wrote:

oh yeah forgot to say Karl Pitwon told me to tell you i am the guy he mentioned in his email
I know Karl pretty well and he is coming over in a few weeks and bringing his assortment of guitars and his banjo, gonna have a jamming session…arrrggghh my first lol, should be fun anyways

I had to think back a bit because we’ve been getting an unreal amount of email lately, but then I remembered a really nice note from Karl out in France:

I’ll give you an example of your success. As the story goes, this guy watched and listened to me playing my guitar to people at camping show, he told me I’d love to do that, I’d love to play the banjo he said. I gave him all the advice I know, which was’nt much as I do not know a lot about banjos. I advised him to learn to frail and told him the only book I know is Pete Seegers one. After a time I rang him up ” Christ have you seen this guy giving FREE banjo lessons on You-tube”. The rest is history he downloaded all your stuff , learnt to down-pick instead of up-pick, I saw him the other day, i was really impressed with what he was doing ( thanks to you), he was on the phone ordering his new Goldtone CB-100……you taught a complete beginner.

Steve’s video looks pretty good. He might want to slow it down a bit, but other than that he’s looking pretty strong.

To me, the neat thing about all of this is the way it illustrates what happens when you start sharing with people. Just like throwing a pebble into a still pond, sharing something like music with the world causes a wild sort of chain reaction of goodwill.

In this case an American banjo picker helped a French guitar player help a guy in the UK get started on the five-string banjo.

If you tried to do something like that it would be impossible, but when you let it just sort of happen things come together with a poetic kind of simplicity. You make music, you share what you love and things just sort of frail, I mean fall, into place.

Oh man, how I wish I could catch a plane and be there when you guys get together for that jam session!