Yeah.

And so, and again, just it, to that part of me that's always enjoyed doing lots of, being able to do lots of different things, you know.

So I'm not...

Most of the work that I've done, if you're, you know, hoping to hear flatpicking on that record, you're not gonna hear it.

A little bit here and there.

There've been some solos I've been able to play.

Uh, but usually it's the stuff that you don't really pay a lot of attention to, just kind of this sort of ground layer strumming acoustic that's just part of country music.

Mm-hmm.

Why don't we just get a summary of that?

Well, early performances were with my dad and some friends of ours around Asheville.

We had a pretty steady slate of gigs, you know, lots of weddings and banquets and things like that.

But as far as my professional career, kind of in tandem with the recording career as I was leaving, high school, 12th grade, started actually working in this studio that I had just been sort of a fly on the wall in for a couple of years.

And through the connections in this studio, there was a...

I think it was Western North Carolina.

I didn't grow up so much in this... kind of music, but there's this country gospel, southern gospel form, and a lot of it was recorded there, and kind of the business of it, a lot of it was around Asheville.

thanks.

Uh-oh.

So what I find there, like it's a challenge for me to sort of discipline myself to play it as kind of plain as that.

I still feel like I'm compelled just as a lifetime improviser to immediately start changing things.

And so, but that's the point is like, what do you do with that? You know, that's, I should say too, like even playing that as far as what I like to teach and what I feel sort of compelled to share with people is that that doesn't have to be some sort of plain Jane, mundane, uh, laborious process because also in bluegrass guitar, you're aware of the length of every note and you're aware of the groove that it is potentially communicating to a listener.

You want to, uh, physically approach this guitar in a way that encourages and optimize resonance, you know, vibrations.

And, and, you know, that's a whole other lane that I just call the, how we play, you know, has nothing to do with what we play.

Um, but they ultimately come together.

And I want to know how you work on it and how you developed your sense of time and how maybe other folks could improve their rhythm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's generally sort of the, the, starts the Wednesday after Memorial Day.

The 2027 calendar's kind of a little bit, uh, funky, and we're still trying to figure out exactly the, the, the week for it or the weekend.

But, uh, uh, Woody Platt, wonderful guitar player, singer, songwriter, musician over in Brevard, North Carolina, that, that, uh, comes out of the Steep Canyon Rangers band, uh, has been producing a lot of things around Brevard, just south of Asheville and beautiful area.

Um, and so started with the Bela Fleck Banjo Camp that's going, I guess, a couple of years longer than mine, and he just invited me out a couple of, you know, couple, I guess, a year after Bela's thing got off the ground and just said, "What do you think about doing a guitar version of this?" And so, you know, it was their beautiful campus of Brevard Music Center.

And, uh, it kind of felt like, yeah, like in this, uh, sort of logical, uh, trajectory of me doing way more teaching through the ArtistWorks format, and at this point I'd done it for 10 or 12 years, um, and thought, "Yeah, that, I, I can do this now." I, I probably couldn't have even conceived making time for it, having any what I would consider like quality, uh, uh, you know, result from it, you know, some years ago.

As, as you look forward with, uh, the camps, is it to grow the attendees or just make it better, um, make it longer, make it more special? Like, what, what do you think about, uh, when you think about refining it?