When we travel, we seek opportunities to meet up with other musicians and play music. Our universe of on-line musician friends is growing quite large. Doug has long been a member of Blues Guitar Unleashed and I’ve been a member of Drumeo for the past 4 years, and more recently we’ve both begun singing and piano lessons with Singeo and Pianote. Can we put together a virtual jam band? What about IRL?
Richard
Our first visit was with Richard from New Jersey. Richard was a folk singer in the UK back in the day when folk music was the music scene of the day. Although family and career and a move to the US took up much of his time over the years, he always maintained his interest in playing guitar and singing. Retirement brought a bit more free time and his interest in music expanded to include piano. Richard is quite active with our online programs and his passion is a joy to see.
Our initial conversation with Richard and his wife Julie was unique! Over snacks, they mentioned their daughters were (quite justifiably!) wary of ‘online strangers’ visiting their parents’ home, so they did research on us on the internet. (To our knowledge, this marks the first time we’ve been vetted as potential serial killers prior to our visiting, though quite likely it’s not actually the first time.) Fortunately for us, what they found was this blog! Apparently they deemed us to be ok (or, at least, not serial killers) and perhaps they will become loyal blog readers!
It didn’t take long for us all to move into Richard’s studio and start talking about songs we could play together. We found a great mix of tunes from his list, from our list, and a few common to both. In Richard’s youth he sang professionally, however today he has not played with others for some time, and we hadn’t played with Richard before, so we tentatively began making some noises together. And once we got started, music happened. Thanks, Richard, for the recording and processing of the video!
Richard and Julie were gracious hosts and we completely enjoyed getting to know them both ‘in real life’ (IRL). We also enjoyed hearing their travel tales as they’ve been on epic cruises, and are planning even more epic cruising for next year.
Bram
We haven’t seen Bram since… the Drumeo meet up in Toronto in July! We also had the pleasure of spending time and jamming with Bram at his home in Maryland – our very first live Drumeo meet up – on last year’s RV trip to Florida.
Naturally, we spent some quality time in Bram’s studio – yes the one that conveniently has 2 full drum kits! Different this time is that I was able to play along on one of those kits!!!! On our last visit, I was recovering from shoulder surgery and could only serve as the sound guy. On this visit though, somewhat unfortunately, without our sound guy the 2 drum kits kind of overwhelmed the one guitar/vocalist and although we could all hear each other quite well – and Inge claims we sounded great from upstairs – our recording was… not so good. And so, regrettably, no video is available from our sessions.
We enjoyed getting caught up with Bram and Inge. They shared with us a new local restaurant featuring an innovative selection of plant-based food, very tasty! And of course, their pups – Poser and Ziva – remembered us well. On this visit Ziva, who’s very, very shy, finally stopped by for ear and chin scratches!
