Re: New Title - Stories from Interlochen
Your post is almost 2 months old, and I'm still stumped on how to reply without writing an encyclopedia. Probably the most interesting would be my experiences not playing music, but having breakfast and lunch with Laurence Juber and a few students and other instructors. And not just every morning at the last workshop, but also going back to the first Stick seminar that paralleled the guitar workshop. Cool thing was, he actually remembered me. I guess he doesn't meet too many Stick players
After receiving his new book, I made the connection to the things we all discussed in the morning to his connection with Paul McCartney. Family is very important to "LJ", he often talked about his wife's theater projects as well as his daughter's recent success with a song she wrote for Pitbull. He did talk about music often, but was more on current projects. Last time I spoke with him he was doing music for video games, but has since moved on and was currently doing more with his wife this year. He was very happy to be working with her. Very level headed professional musician who despite his awesome past, reflects on it, but does not live in it. He's not a "back in the day" kind of person. What I perceive is that Paul helped him learn how to balance his life as a musician. He's also pretty knowledgeable about the effects of different woods and even types of glue have on acoustic guitars. We had some long discussions on that. He's not only knowledgeable about music, but digs down pretty deep into how a guitar is actually made.
Don't recall the subject, but a few small items regarding McCartney and the Beatles came up, but I couldn't see the point of starting any. Besides being very professional musically, he is a very nice person overall.
FWIW, I experimented on the NS with DADGAD tuning, using ADADGADA tuning. Does some cool things, I found the damper was not needed as much as with my normal guitar tuning. However, it has a strange feel on some strings; would need a thicker gage to make it feel normal. That last workshop with LJ and Tom Clippert had DADGAD in my head for weeks afterwards. I eventually put my NS back to where it was, perhaps someday I may do an alternate tuning based off of that for certain things.