Bruce Barton's Page

it has an old slingerlad calf skin head on it and someone suggested it maybe the original any way of knowing

I meant to ask: So tell me about yourself and the folks coming from Canada?  And if you want to know anything in general about the retreat, let me know. I have gone as an uilleann piping student for the last 3 years and other than being a big fan of it and the fact that they are having me teach mandolin this year, I am not an organizer or publicist or anything else associated with the retreat.

How long have you been playing trad Irish, on what instruments if any other than TB, do you play for gigs or sessions or ??? In other words, what is your story?

(If it helps, my brother is Canadian, converted 25 years ago, as a professor at Simon Fraser.)

Hi Bruce, hope this works as I am not too familiar with this site. Feel free to contact me on john, then the at sign, then liestman.com .

I will make every effort to accommodate all who attend. In years past the mandolin class has mostly been attended by players who are pretty well skilled at mandolin but from a bluegrass or old time background and are looking for how to take the dots on the page (the "skeleton" as I sometimes call it) and play it in a true traditional Irish style. I plan to focus on the wide variety of "ornaments", which are mostly shared with tenor banjo but a few of which either work better on mandolin or just sound different. My general teaching mode is to take one tune at a time, teaching very few tunes actually, and really getting under the covers with all that you can do within the skeleton of that tune, both adding and subtracting and altering notes and ornaments. I totally avoid the notion of having one way to play a tune, with a standard set of ornaments each time through - you should more or less never play a tune the same way twice and you need a nice toolbox of ornaments to draw from to let that happen. I also do not just teach a bunch of fun tunes - I go for technique and especially style.

I come from an odd background, having played jazz / swing guitar for years before moving to trad Irish on tenor banjo, mandolin, and more recently uilleann pipes, over the last 30 years. My wife is a professional violinist and harpist who plays some very trad sounding Irish music on the side. This all puts me in a great position to teach not only "what mandolin does best" but also (especially) how to at least try to imitate the core instruments of Irish music on the mandolin.

To conclude, if you are already selling CDs of your tenor banjo playing you may not get much from the class, otherwise I think it will be a great class. It DEFINITELY is a great "camp".

Does that help?