I hope the new year brings happiness and all the "right notes" to everyone. It is good to see that there are new faces here as well as the familar ones I have known for a while. MU appears to be holding up just fine. The vibe is good again and that is a very good thing.

Keep up the good work Viv, Scary, Bert, C'boy, and all the rest of you.

I don't know if anyone else here has gone to one of the National Guitar Workshop (NGW) summer workshops, but I have gone twice and highly recommend it. You can pre-register (with deposit) as an alumni for discounts (the earlier, the higher the discount) and you all may want to check them out. They have campuses all over the USA and for a week, you get to do nothing but go to guitar classes, play guitar, play live, jam, talk guitar, occasionally eat and sleep, AND you can simply stay on-campus where everything is included in tuition. When you calculate it out, it is a really cheap week of vacation and just a blast to go to. There are student and/or faculty concerts every night as well as guest artists from the local AND national circuit. REALLY COOL...

Check it out at www.guitarworkshop.com. The same people put together the online lesson site www.workshoplive.com which is really cool (and a real bargain, if you pay by the year). I don't think they have set tuition prices for the 2008 summer workshop session yet, but you can figure that it will be a little over $1k for the week...includes lodging, food, and pretty much everything you need. The demographics are about evenly split between kids and adults. Most are either under 20 or over 35, and MANY are in their 40's and 50's, so there is likely to be a number of people your age there, WHATEVER your age might be.

No, I don't have ANY affiliation with NGW or gain in any way by plugging them. It is just a lot of fun, and I thought I would plug it while we all still have time to save pennies to pay the balance of tuition. The workshop is mid summer, around the first of July in most locations.

Check it out!

Cheers,
Hal