Thank you 2018.
Hello again!
It has been a few months since my last entry and plenty of things have happened, so let’s start where we finished last time!
August was a truly great month, it gave me the privilege of working alongside the phenomenal Brigette Faessler as we created a music video for ‘Home’. This was a lot of fun. For those who are waiting for my CD it’s now available to stream on Spotify, click here for free listening.
Among various restaurant and bar gigs, I had the pleasure of traveling to the border of Austria and Switzerland once again, to visit the great team at ‘Guitar-Repairs Urs Winkler’ to play for their open house. When it comes to enjoyable performance spaces, it does not get much better then their shop, with incredible guitars covering every inch of wall space there was plenty of inspiration to draw from.
For the last week of August I travel to the Netherlands for the first time and hung out at the ‘Django Grappeli’ workshop. This was an inspiring week of non-stop gypsy swing. I had the privilege of meeting and playing with some outstanding musicians such as Sebastien Giniaux, Samson Schmitt and Tim Kliphuis. If you happen to be interested in the gypsy swing style of music, I strongly recommend this camp.
Onto September, Maestro Guitars were conducting their European tour and I was their endorsee for the Manheim Guitar Summit. There, I met a lot of great players such as Magdalena Kowalczyk and Jon Gomm. I did a workshop on the acoustic MainStage and peeped through all the newest guitar related products on the market, it was a good day to be a guitar enthusiast!
I explored a little more of the French speaking part of Switzerland, there I met a wonderful builder of Cigar Box Guitars at DB guitars. Daniel, the builder, was great, very welcoming and had a wonderful workshop in which we spoke and played.
There was a great merging of guitar related energies for the ‘Knowing the guitar’ workshop. This event was hosted in the beautiful venue of Guitar Repairs and was presented by Hozen, the Master builder of Maestro guitars. I had the very enjoyable pleasure of demonstrating the versatility and playability of 10 different Maestro guitars - it does not get much better than that.
I also traveled into Ticino, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, for the first time to meet with the team at Schertler in their head office. I was given a full tour of their workspace and we discussed the finer points of quality analog acoustic sound together. I learnt a lot and of course tested out a bunch of new gear.
The last thing that September brought forward was my first concert in Italy. I traveled to Cremona (north Italy) to represent Schertler at the Cremona Musica. I demonstrated at the Schertler booth and played a slot on the main stage. I loved Italy, maybe a little bit to much, it’s definitely a place I want to spend more time in future.
Now for October, I performed at some very nice events over this month. First, was at ‘Theatre Am Kastelburg’ a beautiful theatre of 120 seats in Waldkirch Germany.
Next was the Dreiland Yoga Festival back in Basel, Switzerland.
Hanging out at the Dreiland Yoga Festival
Thanks to the wonderful team at the ‘Swiss foundation for Young Musicians’ I performed on top of Roche Tower in Basel - for those of you who don’t know about this tower, it’s the tallest building in Switzerland. The view from up there is phenomenal, also, it is the HQ for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, usually normal ‘plebs’ like me cannot get access into the building.
Hanging out on top of Roche tower, in good company
In November was ‘Art of Guitar’ festival at ‘Nellie Nashorn’ in Lorrach Germany, where I was treated to a full house of happy listeners. The second was ‘Guitars & More’ expo where I represented ‘Guitar-Repairs Urs Winkler’, demonstrating at their booth and performing on the main stage. While at this guitar exhibition, I met with some of the team from VOVOX and after a trial of their product I am now a proud (and very happy) endorsee of their cables. Check them out!
At ‘Guitars & More’ with ‘Guitar-Repairs Urs Winkler
The ‘Guitars and More’ team put together this awesome wee video!
The 4th and final instalment of my YouTube ‘office sessions’ experiment is up, feel free to have a look and listen here, if you have not, please consider subscribing to my channel!
Lastly, I had a great chat with Aaron from the New Zealand radio station Tuwharetoa FM. We spoke a lot about music and some of my recent projects in Europe. It was very heartwarming talking to a kiwi again, feel free to have a listen by clicking here.
That pretty much sums up the last few months for me. Now that 2018 has come to an end, I am turning my focus and energies to new year. I am excited as there are some great projects in the preparation phases and still so much music to explore, learn and share.