Sunday Surprise

We were treated today to an impromptu filming of a music video by Cheick Hamala Diabate, a great Malian musician. Happy to have HMT featured in this and will hopefully post a link to the finished video!

Dear HMT,

It's been a great nine years, but...




I'm running away to join a Mariachi band.

Love Always,
Juanita

Just another Sunday at HMT...

Old-Time For Obama!

In honor of election day tomorrow, enjoy this recently posted video of old-time musicians and volunteers jamming for Obama in Charlottesville, VA. Featuring former HMT employees Joe Fallon (bass) and Lydia Martin (lead banjo)!



FOLK THE VOTE!!

They're on a mission from god...

In the first of what hopefully will be many entries about what our talented HMT staff does whilst they're not at HMT renting trombones, restringing erhus, shipping out accordion reedwax and otherwise keeping the world safe for folk music...

rob hinkal (current guitar sales guy) and Rowan Corbett (former assistant manager who still fills in occasionally and is also our House tech support geek) are part of the "acoustic grunge" band ilyAIMY, and are currently touring the midwest. They've been to Louisville, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia MO, where this Halloween morn they graced the stage of "Pepper & Friends" morning TV show.



Due to copyright concerns I don't think I can post the video here, but you can follow this link to the KOMU website...click on "Performances" on the right side, and you'll see the two links for the ilyAIMY performances.

Seemed a perfect opportunity for them to channel another famous musical duo.




Happy Halloween!

Christylez Bacon!

We welcome to the HMT staff Chris "Christylez" Bacon, multi-instrumentalist and beatboxer extraordinaire! Here's Chris demo-ing a bass recorder...or is it the world's largest pepper mill?




Check out Chris' music at www.christylez.com or www.myspace.com/christylezbacon

HMT Hijinks

Ahh, it's that time of year again. There's a chill in the air, the crisp and clear notion of fall working its way into our world. The Maryland Renaissance Festival is well underway, which means we're graced with the appearance of the lovely Amelia Adams, our booth manager. But most of all, it's >>insert music of doom<< BAND INSTRUMENT RENTAL SEASON. Now don't get us wrong, we love getting hundreds of area schoolchildren started in their musical career, and it brings in a whole new set of customers to us, which is really nice. However, it just gets well...REALLY busy. And the staff here at HMT has to find ways to decompress and deal with the stress and busy-ness. What I'm tryin' to say is, we get a little goofy sometimes. And here's proof:




Amelia runs with scissors. Don't try this at home, kids.



Amelia & Erik demonstrate the $5 bagpipe.



Kristen captures the rare and elusive pygmy violin. It's sooo cuuuuute!



OK, lemme 'splain. So, we've got Amelia. We've got rob. We've got Paul The Younger. There's a lot of hair going on here, folks. And...we've got a fan. I wanted to get them all in front of the fan in a rock star pose and watch the hair a-flyin'. Well, the fan wasn't quite powerful enough to really capture my vision. But you get the idea. Sometimes folkies have to rock too.