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.

We are on the Youtubes

Check out our YouTube channel!

Many thanks to Mark Sylvester for tirelessly demo-ing all these instruments. Glenn Tucker did the filming and Trevor Higgins engineered the audio.

Here's a few examples:

Steve Carmody Concert Jumbo


Goodall Concert Jumbo


Weber Gallatin Mandolin

Pictures of the new location--finally!!

Thanks to our webmistress and photographer Darcy Nair, we now have a virtual tour of the new location on our website. Rather than pasting the pics here, just follow the link to take the tour and see what we look like now!

Yesterday, we had a very successful session with HMT teacher Mark Sylvester. We filmed video segments of Mark playing many of our higher-end guitars. We will be uploading these to Youtube and linking to them on our website so that folks can see and hear what these fine instruments sound like in action if they can't come to the store. Glenn Tucker did the video, with Trevor Higgins assisting in audio so that we could get CD-quality audio on these clips. Stay tuned !

Long lost brothers

Dave yaks it up with funnyman Lewis Black at his reading at Sixth & I Synagogue

Join the Nose Flute Revolution

Frequent customer Peter Bankson, who makes an annual order with us for 100 nose flutes, has provided us with a video of what he does with these! Peter is with Faith @ Work and makes annual trips to Guatemala to build elementary schools in a different small village each year. He introduces the joys of nose flute to the locals and they have a great time on their work breaks and after school tootin' away.

For more information check out www.faithatwork.org and www.hmtrad.com/HMT/noseflutes.html



Bueno!