We had a great weekend, we played three times and bart DJ’d once.

Friday night we went to see the awesome Savannah Coronet at Gunsmoke, and the band following her cancelled, so we did an impromptu gig thanks to Reggier and the folks at Gunsmoke.

Saturday was a big day for Home Cooked Music at Cookie. We played at 3, followed by Cosmic and Savannah, and we played again at 7. We had a great crowd, thanks y’all :) Savannah and Cosmic were incredible. In between our gigs bart got called in to DJ over at Hobo Island for Fujin’s birthday party, so bart really worked his furry tail off this weekend, even if he was human yesterday!

Thank you all very much for showing up and your generosity. SL is always a collaborative effort, that’s what makes it cool. Inga, one of my dearest friends in SL, made us a t-shirt we’ll be giving away at our shows. Inga has come far from being a humble hobo to being one of the best clothing designers in SL, please check out her store, Inga Wind….there’s an ad with an SLURL teleport link on this blog. Her clothes are to be seen to be believed.

The picture is Thinkerer sporting his ‘grizzled prospector’ look, which I think is really cute :) I blatantly stole it from Arabella’s Flickr group she made for Home Cooked Music — join it if you like, we love pictures! There are snapshots from it in a widget on this blog, and check out her regular account, she takes lovely shots.

Thinkerer is way more than just the owner of Cookie. Think is a retired professor who works tirelessly in SL to promote and mentor new talent…builders, scripters, artists, comedians, musicians, actors, you name it. He mentors and promotes them tirelessly and quietly. He builds sims and helps others build sims, he works with other educators in SL, he helps newbies to SL in countless ways. I can’t list all the stuff he does or all the people he has helped, it’s a very long list, but he does it all just because he wants to and he is a real sweetie and a huge asset to the SL community. He doesn’t take compliments very well :) but let him know you appreciate him and help support his sims like Cookie, that make SL better for everyone! Thank you Think :)

Welcome to bart & whirl’s mess on the web. We have just started playing for people ‘officially’ in SL, so this blog is part of the promotion effort. Scary!

I blame Inga, Derek, Nolan, Titter and Beezle :P

Actually I suppose it is my fault. I missed playing drums, so I got a banjo (drummer and banjo jokes are much the same, that’s my excuse.) Then bart got a banjo. Then when I whined about wanting to learn bottleneck slide on a resonator but Nationals cost too much, bart found the awesome Frank at Republic Guitars, and I got a great tricone. Started making horrible noises and scaring the dogs. Bart naturally got his first acoustic shortly after that, and before I knew it was giving in to his inner geek and trying to figure out how to stream in SL. That’s when our friends started to bug us to play at our home in SL and it all went downhill from there.

Thinkerer and Reggier prodded us to start playing at Think’s sim, Cookie, so we’ve done that a couple of times. Reggier is our manager now and a HUGE help. She also manages Lauren, a good friend, and Cosmic, a great banjo player, so it’s all very conspiratorial I think :) Anyway, people seem to like it, and we’re willing to play anywhere, open for anyone, and practice a lot. Right now we’re doing mostly folk tunes, but we hope to expand on that. We’ve both been playing a little over a year (bart’s never played guitar, and I consider bottleneck playing a whole different animal from my years piddling w/ chords in regular tuning). Bart’s learning fingerpicking fast, though, and I continue to attempt real bottleneck blues, so hopefully we can incorporate those later.

Geo Meek is all over SL making vids and has made all of ours so far. We hope to put lots of videos and I’m not sure what we’ll post on the blog portion of this site, but we’re open to any suggestions :)