Clear Blue Productions

A bluegrass recording studio and video production company.

Bluegrass music is our passion. We take great care to make sure the rich, natural, acoustic sound of your instrument is present on the finished recording.

Ron Block DVD

Published by Brance on November 24th, 2008
Filed under CD and DVD releases
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Ron Block - A Fresh Look At Bluegrass BanjoJust today we finished editing the new AcuTab DVD featuring Ron Block. The DVD is titled Ron Block - A Fresh Look At Bluegrass Banjo, and is available for purchase from AcuTab’s online store.

Shooting this DVD was a lot of fun. Ron is a great player, and a great person. He is very detail oriented and his DVD ended up being so long we had to decide between cutting out a bunch of stuff, or making it a two disc set. The discussion and material were so good we just couldn’t bring ourselves to cut much out, so we ended up with a two disc set that runs just over 3.5 hours in total length.

It includes nearly an hour of discussion between Ron and AcuTab’s John Lawless. Topics covered in the discussion include Ron’s background, influences, practice routine and tips, Ron’s unique take on positions and scales for banjo, dynamics, bends, tone and setup.

Following the discussion is 2.5 hours of Ron teaching, in detail, his breaks to seven songs from the Alison Krauss & Union Station repertoire.

To give you a taste of what it looks like, we put together this 5 minute trailer for the DVD set.

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Bill Evans: The Banjo In America

Published by Brance on March 24th, 2008
Filed under Studio News
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I produced a series of video clips for banjo player Bill Evans recently. The clips aren’t instructional in nature, they are simple performance pieces. But Bill’s not necessarily playing the banjo in each one.

Bill has been conducting a tour for some time now called The Banjo in America. During the course of a concert on this tour, Bill plays a variety of different instruments which are historical predecessors to the modern 5-string banjo.

For more information about The Banjo in America, read this blog post I published over at The Bluegrass Blog.

Here is one of the clips. In this one, Bill is playing an African Akonting. Pretty cool sound!

 

Be sure to visit Bill’s YouTube channel to see the other videos. There are six in total, including two he plays on his 1937 Gibson flathead -75.

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