Music is my laboratory.
Where the theory meets practice.
Everything I say about learning and the brain gets tested here—in my own playing, in teaching, in helping people learn things they'd been told were out of reach.
Projects
Wandering South
Have banjo, will travel. Original songs in the alt-country/Americana vein, with room to breathe and space to think.
Chillgrass Project
Like bluegrass, but more chill. Clawhammer banjo, slow tempos, and a front porch where everyone's welcome.
The Georgia Jays
Old-time music with guts and pulse. A fiddle-banjo duo with Justin Manglitz—award-winning master distiller and fiddler.
Instruction
I teach music to adults—specifically, adults who think they missed their window. Most of them are wrong about that.
The teaching is grounded in learning science. When adults struggle to learn, it's not because their brains have declined. It's because nobody ever taught them how to practice effectively. Fix the approach, and progress resumes.
Brainjo
A system for adult music learning built on what we actually know about neuroplasticity.
The method takes the science seriously: deliberate practice, spaced repetition, appropriate challenge, and—crucially—removing the obstacles that cause most adults to quit before they see results.
It works. People who were sure they couldn't learn music find out they were wrong. I get to watch it happen all the time.
Performance, instruction, and speaking can all be part of the same event.
The music and the ideas belong together.
Contact for music or integrated experiences