With Brennish Thompson
**Morgan:** Welcome to Zeitgeist Radio, the podcast for music lovers to expand their horizons into new and interesting musical subcultures. I'm your host, Morgan Roe, founder of the Zeitgeist Academy. Each episode, I interview someone from a different musical community. Zeitgeist means spirit of the times. And my goal is to make that spirit come alive for you and help you appreciate musical communities you may not know much about.
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My guest today is Brennish Thompson, a musician from Lee, New Hampshire. Brennish, welcome to Zeitgeist Radio.
**Brennish:** Hey, how's it going?
**Morgan:** It's it's funny cause I have a lot of musicians on here that also do other things, but you are actually like full time. A musician. Which is awesome.
**Brennish:** Yeah.
Fundamentally, I was just saying in our preamble, it's going on my headstone, musician,
**Morgan:** musician. I love it. And very interesting niches. This is going to be a very fun conversation. But can we just start out with who you are? Can you give us an overview of who is Brennish Thompson musically?
**Brennish:** Yeah, sure.
So I've been kind of a musician my whole life, so it's funny to think about it kind of framed like that. Yeah. But everything I do is kind of music related. I got most of it from my family going back generations and generations. We've been playing music one way or another a lot of times for fun, but also professionally as well.
One of those connections that we just figured out, which is pretty cool is my great aunt, Beth had an all women's group in Salt Lake City. And just like seeing that, that, you know, that gave me some, some some juice to keep going here with what I'm doing. Yeah. But yeah, my, I primarily got music mostly from my father and my grandparents as well on my on my dad's side.
My grandfather played harmonica growing up and would, would sing in the house. My grandmother taught herself piano from a player piano in her own home. And then eventually got into banjo, which got my dad into playing banjo and piano and stuff when he was real young. And that same sort of path happened for me.
So when I was born, I was going to gigs all the time with my dad, grow up going to Caeli's and the Irish music kind of world and music world. And there's, I know there's some previous episodes here, as I guess about, you know, the Caeli culture and kitchen music and that kind of thing. But yeah, and, and I got sort of inoculated with, with the tunes.
They were in my head from a young age. I was sprinting around and, and you know, playing with, with kids and, and throwing balls around and stuff. And, but I was absorbing when you're that age, you really you, you get it passively even if you're not trying to, to do it. So I kind of got the knack for wanting to be into it and and got a fiddle at 18 months old.
There's a bit of a story there, . But yeah, yeah, I can, I can, I can back up a second here. There's, there's a great, there's video evidence of this. My dad and actually I'll, I'll back up even a little further to explain this side of things. So my dad was, was a fiddle player for years and years and years played in Nashville and did touring and other things kind of came to it.
Very, really naturally, essentially a band was like, Hey, our guitar player up and left. We need a guitar player. You're a guy. It seemed like you're, you're into doing things here. Come learn guitar with us and ended up playing with these guys. And that led him down a path of, of doing music kind of for fun and then eventually for hire.
And that extended about to just before I was born and he got a, a neurological condition called focal dystonia. So we do a lot of work with disabilities now because of this, this where it's a little bit like. Parkinson's. So it's a neurological disease but it doesn't continue to progress through your life.
You kind of have it or you don't. And he lost the ability to use his right shoulder. So he was a right handed player. And well, I can talk a little bit about right and left playing too, cause that's something that I, that I, I focus a lot on, but he , lost the ability to play right handed. He had other instruments that he went and started playing and things, but about when I was born, he decided, okay, I'm going to take another crack at playing the violin, but I'm going to try left handed this time, which for any of us who were not gifted and ambidextrous, it's a really tricky thing to do to relearn an instrument or do anything right up, right, you know, your name with the left hand.
So he started learning kind of violin alongside me growing up. Learning violin. So he would play at my crib and things. So one day he comes over and he's playing by my crib and I yanked the bow out of his hand. So yeah, and then the rest is history. So,
**Morgan:** So you and the fiddle have been one for a long time.
**Brennish:** Yeah. Yeah. Born in the, in the same hole.
**Morgan:** Again, I think people can tell it's been very hard to narrow down a single topic for this one episode. We might have to have you back, Brennish. Let's talk about some of this folk music stuff. Sounds like you've been immersed in it your entire life. What was the first kind of memories that you have of, of, of folk and like what, what made you fall in love with it and what keeps that love alive?
**Brennish:** Yeah, so that's a great question. Folk music is, to me, I talked a little bit at the very beginning about how I grew up with it and how it sort of was intrinsic to my upbringing beyond just actually playing it, you know, being around it growing up, so a similar thing kind of extends to how I got into it, I would be along with gigs and I'd be hanging out with friends and things and listening to the tunes but that music's pretty enchanting and it's short.
You know, when you talk about a lot of music, we're talking really long, complicated pieces with lots of instrumentation. I mean, modern music, a lot of modern music is that way. I mean, I can't, you know, half the top 10 singles right now that are popular. I couldn't just make in my room, you know, you need a multimillion dollar studio or you have, you know, maybe you can make them in your bedroom with the right gear and right equipment, but it's You know, the type of music that I grew up listening to was tunes that lasted maybe a minute in length and it's consumable, right?
So I was listening to all this stuff growing up and the environment that folk music exists in is one that's super, in most ways, very friendly. inclusive. It's something that is like very comfortable feeling. Especially having grown up in it myself, but also I think to newcomers as well. And so I just felt kind of at ease.
I wanted to play the tunes, you know, it wasn't a matter of somebody, you know, there's no gun to my head saying, you know, play, play music. You just gotta all of a sudden realize, hey, I've heard this tune enough times, and if I have at least a little bit of proficiency on an instrument then, you know, you can jump right in.
And that's kind of the beauty of folk music. So yeah, I, I got some, some formal lessons here and there which really would help with, with learning how to actually play the instruments themselves. But I think predominantly I got my, the, the folk music thing. It just happened the way it's meant to happen.
Just naturally, you know, through through osmosis.
**Morgan:** Nice, nice. There's a lot of also different scenes. You know, we've had several people on this podcast, even just talking about there's the Irish Caeli scene. There's the contra dance scene. There's the performance like traditional dance and traditional music scene, like performance style.
Where do you kind of sit in these? Like, what is your scene? Where are some places that you play and what is, where, where do you kind of hang out in this hodgepodge of folk music?
**Brennish:** Yeah. So folk music is in a couple of different veins. There's folk music in the sense that we're playing just with folks, which is sort of the obvious one, right?
So playing at people's houses or playing. You know, in someone's kitchen, you know, which is just like the, the homey aspect of it, the, the, you know, which kind of can even extend to light performance, coffee houses and open mics and things like that. And then there's the other side of it, which is professional folk music and traditional music, which I also grew up in kind of hand in hand.
So I spent a lot of time. As a kid playing totally casually in settings that were just like, this is, you know, I'm having a good time kind of thing. And it became my social life growing up was going to music circles and things. You know, you think about what can get people to hang out together.
You know, maybe they have a mutual love of, of reading or they are there. Maybe they like to go have a pint at a pub or something. Those things can all be, there's a lot of different ways to socialize, but socializing with music is, is a pretty intense thing. And it's so satisfying because it's like, okay, here we are, you know, we're, we're, you know, shooting the shot, having a good time.
And it's like, oh, we're a little bored. Oh, we know 500 tunes together. We can sit down for hours to display tunes. So that was a amazing thing growing up to having that and totally extends today. And then the other side of the coin being professional music. So. My dad growing up was a professional musician and he made his living that way and he made books about music and taught and, and did lessons and that sort of thing but also performed.
So I would be with him at performances from anywhere from, you know, again, someone's living room, you know, they hire you, say it's a, you know, their grandparents grew up listening to Irish music or Scottish music and they want a piece of that in their home. So I get to feel that. That kind of connection that somebody values what you do because it means a lot to them, even at a really small scale like that, how important that is all the way up to larger venues playing in theaters and, and, and, you know, all the way up to stadiums, things like that.
When you play music, you, you, I mean, you definitely with folk music, you feel that connection. No matter how big or small it is and I got into sort of the professional side of it maybe when I was about eight and started playing gigs. My very first gig on stage, like real gig was for the fantastic barn dance caller Dudley Loffman here in the East Coast.
He's a renowned folk hero to a lot of people had the National Heritage Award and eventually won the New Hampshire. Governor's award, which my dad and I both won this this previous year, the New Hampshire state governor award for folk heritage. So he was a mentor growing up having this incredible person who played with small groups of people, but was always very professional.
I mean, extremely professional. On stage, he's, he's like a, you know, a good businessman of you. I gotta be a good business person to be, you know, a, a Confederate in the scene sort of thing, but he taught me from a young age, even when I was eight, I came up on stage and I played a pair of wooden spoons on stage with this whole dance and he came to me afterwards and gave me, you know, whatever it was back then, 12, which was like a crazy amount of money or so, you know, when you're eight years old, it felt like I was rich.
So but that gave me this, you know, the feeling that, you know, you can make money doing this. You can, you can live. Doing this and it's not just a for fun thing. It's not just, Oh, my dad does this cool music thing. Like, Oh, I can, you can actually, you know, this can be a path. It's a hard path, but it's something that is like very fulfilling.
It, you know, there's a lot of man hours that go into to playing music and performing for people. A lot of which is, you know, seldom seen, you know, by, by anyone who on the front end of things. But it's, it's, you know, as far as the job goes, I, I, I, So blessed, you know, to be in the music scene like this.
**Morgan:** Oh, that's amazing. Well, congratulations on that award. I did see that on your on your website. That is amazing. Again, that could be a whole nother conversation. So we're going to get into some, a little more technical stuff as well. In this episode, are you able to give us a little bit of background on your technical expertise?
Is that something that you studied? Is that something that you picked up along the way? Is it self taught? Where, where's your background as far as that goes?
**Brennish:** Yeah. So music to me has always been a big part of my life. But another big part of my life has always been science. And that goes from a really young age, wanting to be an archeologist, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people who feel the same way when they were a kid being interested, you know, you watch eyewitness, you watch history channel, whatever it might be, you know, you, you, I had a lot of those influences growing, growing up between my dad who was a microbiologist and studied psychology of music.
Yeah. And a lot of other related fields. And my grandmother was an amateur naturalist, was super into all things science. So, you know, my grandfather, my mom's side was an engineer. There was basically a lot of science present in my life growing up. So. When I wasn't thinking about being a musician, I was thinking about being a scientist.
And what I quickly kind of figured out in my early teens was that I really loved doing science. But I wasn't, I didn't have a brain for school particularly. So I did a lot of things on my own. I built, you know, robots and did stuff with FIRST Robotics, which was a fantastic program for homeschoolers in our state here in New Hampshire.
The Segway founder Dean came and this was his stomping ground. So he spent, pumped a lot of money into getting kids into doing science. And that's what, you know, kind of eventually led to things like the Mars rover projects and stuff like that. You know, getting young people into this kind of stuff. So from a young age, I was always sideloading, you know, science with the music.
And then step forward to, you know, quite a few years later of having spent many years performing on stage doing our own sound. We're a small act. My dad and I are often an act, which is just a duo. And we have four or five bands that we play with. And I often defaulted to becoming the sound engineer when you're, you know, a kid, how, what can you do?
Right? So I, I either have a noise maker, I'm doing percussion on stage in the case of I mentioned with Dudley or I'd be the sound person, right? So growing up doing sounds kind of just in that environment, I felt fairly familiar with it. Much like growing up listening to the tunes, I had them sort of in my head.
You get a lot of instincts for how to, to deal with, with sound scenarios and what sounds good, what works, you know. And also what facilitates making the music enjoyable to people? What, what, what do you need for people to not think about the sound? Sound is something that we don't think about a lot when it's working, but we do think about a lot when it isn't working this being an audio only format, you'll I'm sure you can recognize that.
So. I got really into, to the, the idea of that, just kind of the notion of microphones and things. And when I was maybe 17 or 18, I decided to start kind of an independent freelance recording situation and, you know, there's not a particular thing I would describe it as, but I collected some microphones, some good recording gear and some good video gear sidecar that with that.
I had an interest in photography and video. And I started reaching out to folks and seeing if they wanted, you know, video and audio, cause I. There's people, you know, when you see an act, a good YouTube video, or you see a good music video or something, it, it leaves you, leaves you with something. And I felt that I I wanted to bring that to a wider audience of people in the folk scene because there's not a ton of resources.
Not a lot of people in folk music have the time or the money to focus on sound. So seeing that impact that I was seeing in other genres of music, I kind of wanted to bring that to traditional music. So, I started that and then that leads finally into sort of the era that I'm in now, which I would say was driven largely in part, I got a 3D printer when I was about 2017 and I, I saw the, the magic come, you know, come to life with the Star Trek reality, you know and yeah, so got a 3D printer and needed my own sound I wanted to, to get better stage sound for myself.
And I went to an amazing event called Folk Alliance International, which is again, something I could talk at length about, but it's a big meeting of industry professionals, managers, musicians. And it's basically a giant networking event. And we found a company called your heaven audio there. That was like a brand new startup.
And they claimed a lot of equipment. Pretty miraculous things about their, their audio technology, which many people hear all the time. You know, you hear magic cures to things, the as seen on TV factor and but I was fairly, you know, I, I was curious. So we, we went and this little story is, is worth it.
The The inception of this, I walked into their, their room and they had, it was Bruce Molsky, the, the old time fiddler. And he was playing in the corner of this conference hall. You can imagine there's two or 300 people in this hall. It's cacophony there. You know, we have Bose, the other audio company near us with their speakers.
They're blasting stuff. We, on the other side flanking was a drum company also making just a cacophony of racket. And I sat down. And I saw that Bruce was, was playing in this corner with this little, he had a fiddle and a little microphone in the fiddle and a pair of headphones on. And without saying anything, the owner of the company, who's now my boss, came up and handed me a pair of headphones and I put them on and all I could hear was his fiddle and it sounded like it was in the studio or something.
So that to me, that, that, you know, took my breath away as somebody who was interested in this kind of thing. And I yeah, I, I bought their two floor units and, and yeah, after some modifications and things with my 3d printing yeah, I sent them some some, some of my ideas and they, they hired me pretty quickly.
So but yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, sometimes it's the wow factor.
**Morgan:** Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. So let's dig into, you've, you've said a lot of things here that I think we should probably dig into a little bit. Let's just start with a very broad thing. In the folk scenes, what are some of the challenges when it comes to audio?
**Brennish:** Yeah. So in folk music when it comes to audio and performance, I like to take a step back when I think about it and think about sort of the history of acoustics and why Why, you know, why instruments are the way they are fiddles, you know, guitars, things like this, are hundreds and hundreds of years old, I mean, violins have been around for forever and ever, it seems like but then in the grand scheme of things, there's been things like bagpipes, woodwinds, they've been around for even longer, or add zeros to that number, right?
So I you know, a great example of this is amphitheaters. If you've ever gone to an outdoor venue think something like Red Rocks, you know, or, or the Romans or the Greeks where they'll have, you know, a, a bowl set for musicians or theater performers or whoever it might be spoken word to play. And the whole purpose of them is to.
To facilitate being able to see and hear what they're doing and to think that they were thinking about that, you know, 5, 10, 20, 000 years ago
**Morgan:** engineers, man,
**Brennish:** those are the early audio engineers. You know, they may not have microphones or electricity, but they the concept was there, right? So. They've been working on this kind of thing forever.
We have, humans have been, have been trying to make what I would say is rooms that, that sound good is, is the the all encompassing way of describing it. And that sort of moved to me this, this needle in my head that I realized about instruments being, and this is something my, my boss at my company has a really, some, some.
Choice things about instruments are really sort of rooms as well. And when I think about folk musicians we are always playing in particular types of venues. More than often, we're playing in a house, we're playing in a church, we're playing in a, in a Grange Hall or something, these venues that were made for acoustic music and that's cause they come from an era where the music was these instruments that are made to be played in developed spaces and things.
So. When you talk about that whole narrative, there's nowhere in there are there microphones? Nowhere, no, you know, nowhere in that equation is there amplification as we know it today, you know, speakers, cables, doodads, right? So I
**Morgan:** think many of those people in those environments have like resistance towards amplification.
Like it's, it's taking away.
**Brennish:** Absolutely. Yeah. And there's a big emphasis that I see in my work. On what I call acoustic transparency, which is the idea of what can we do to facilitate a musician on stage being you know, as impactful as possible to their audience. And this is an area of study that my dad also did quite a lot of research in with music psychology.
His thesis in school was the idea that if a musician is looking at you in the eyes when they're playing, rather than, you know, looking off into the eighth or That there you register their music more and a similar thing can be said about the way that it sounds, the better that you can hear somebody, the better, you know, you can see someone's playing by go and watch a musician on stage and they're blocked out by a dozen microphone stands.
Well, number one, as a photographer, I'm frustrated, but number two. You know, you may not be able to see their face or get their expressions or pick up the nuances of their playing as easily. So forever and ever, we've been working on acoustic transparency. What can we do to cut down on the things that you see on stage?
And that goes very much hand in hand with how annoying it is to do something. So, the annoyance factor is one that I think is a big one with folk musicians. We want to focus on our music. We don't want to focus on cables. We don't want to focus on, do I have enough for this or that plugged in? Can I hear this or that?
Simplicity takes the reigns 95 percent of the time. So yeah, my, my musical, my whole amplification you know, ethos in the last few years has been, what can I do for either myself on stage or people that come to my own studio or people that use my microphone systems, to to make it easier for them to play on stage and not think about it as much and focus down on the music they're trying to make as accurately as possible.
**Morgan:** Yeah. So do you tend to do this by eliminating like the number of things on the stage or by changing the focus of like the directional directionality of the microphones? Like, I know this is like, Hey, can you just describe physics to me in a word, but you know, in an accessible way as you can, like,
what does that look like on the stage? Are you taking away cables? Please say you're taking away cables, but also then you get into Bluetooth, which is also annoying.
**Brennish:** Yes, exactly. Yeah. So you can see, I mean, this, you can run, run with this cause it's, it's one of these things that, you know, we think of wireless, we think of cables, we think of how many things are on stage.
I. An example I like to think back on is early recording and bluegrass, for instance, as a reference point. Even today, bluegrass, if you watch somebody who's on stage doing this type of music, often they have a single microphone. They'll have a mic in the center of the stage, often a beautiful looking mic, you know, used as sort of a centerpiece.
And that facilitates the sound. It looks good, but what it also does is it forces you into a box that is working around that microphone and being hyper aware. Of where you are in relationship to the mic. So all of these things come down to the style. So bluegrass music that it facilitates that you're using acoustic instruments, they don't, they're meant to be heard at distance.
So violins, fiddles, banjos. I mean, talk about modern banjos with resonators. They are meant to be as loud as possible. I mean, that's the reason the resonator is there to be loud in the 1920s. You didn't have mics very often, and you were relying heavily on, are my instruments loud enough? And if I'm the loudest band, I might get the gig, right?
Right. So when it comes to bluegrass, the idea was that here we have this what is essentially an acoustic thing, but bluegrass being a fairly modern invention, what can we do to bring it in? Well, we add a mic. So I was already a lot to a lot of folks. Oh, we have a microphone or why, you know, crazy. And so, but the idea is that the musicians got to be really thinking about it.
It's solo music. You know, you play your backup musicians, but really you're, you're going around in a circle and people are soloing. And if you've ever watched a bluegrass musicians on stage, they'll move in and out, they'll duck in and out towards the mic in order to sound, you know, to come bring the dynamics forward so that you can be heard and to create that sort of soundscape that we, we think of as a kind of a polished sound.
And that extended as well to early recording. So wax cylinder wire recordings, even vinyl up to a certain point you were pressed if you had more than one microphone. I mean, with wax cylinder, you had a cone, you had a giant, you know 10 foot long Victrola cone looking thing. And that's, you had to put every single musician behind it.
And then the end of that might only be a foot wide, right? So How do you do that? Well, some careful choreography and a lot of sidestepping, right? So it's, we are at a place now where we have the ability to have 20 microphones on stage, but do you need 20 microphones on stage? The answer is probably not.
Probably not. Yeah, so we're, I'm always looking to strip things away and in my own setup you know, I'll just to put my own kind of journey where I'm at right now, I just built All of my gear into a single case. So now I have a single case and this, I have a luxury that I'm an engineer and I know how to do these sorts of things.
But having a case that I don't have to think about much. I have, I have one cable in and one cable out. That's sort of my nirvana. There's a whole lot of junk behind the scenes in that to make it work, but bringing that same mentality to stage when I do live sound or recording is, is a big part of my own sound reinforcement.
**Morgan:** Yeah. Wow. This is so interesting. As you're speaking, I'm thinking of, for example, bluegrass concerts I've been to, and I'm like, wow, I never thought I figured they were being showy, you know, like showcasing the soloist, but there was also that audio component there. And then I'm also thinking about, I, so I do contra dance.
I've been doing that since I was eight. It's my happy place. I know that sound is always the big thing. You go to any of these big dance weekends. And the sound guy gets like more applause than anyone else because it's, it's complicated to take. And, and I'm just thinking about this now that you, with everything you've been saying, so you've got a super resonant instrument designed to project.
You've got a super resonant hall designed to bounce that sound around. But then you have, in the case of a contra dance community, you have like, 200, 400 people, bodies absorbing that sound. So then you still need to amplify. There's just really a lot going on. So at what scale are these, like, what, these devices and these things?
things that you're talking about right now. Like where on the scale from like someone's living room up to those large dance weekends like the Folklife Festival in Seattle just happened you know, 800 people on the floor, outdoor area, so you're like super resident on the one side and then it's outdoors, you know, so where's the scale kind of that we're talking about here?
**Brennish:** So I think for me, whenever I think about when someone comes to me and asks me like what kind of gear. Am I going to need? And and of course the question can be as simple as, well, I want to be heard on stage, right? And what do I need to be heard on stage? I think really fundamentally about, you know, the simple stuff.
What is the, what are you playing in an instrument? Do you want to sound like your instrument sounds? Are you, are you trying to run a pedal board with a hundred things? You know there's this discussion we talk about in folk music and traditional music between sounding authentic or sounding the way that you want it.
Hear it in your head, right? And, and there's a healthy medium for a lot of folks, but some people really just want to hear their instrument louder. And so the approach to making your instrument just louder can be quite a bit different. And often even harder than making it sound you know approachable, but maybe different how you hear in your head or effects and that sort of thing.
So One of the big things I think about is like the type of locations you're playing and isolation and things like that. One of the major issues you have with microphones is picking up more than you want, right? So we are always talking about how do we have the best quality sound? How do I have, you know, if you get into the technical side of things, everyone's searching, what is the best microphone?
What is the best preamp? And it goes, the list goes on and people spend, you know, billions of dollars at this point trying To achieve this but, but the real, the kind of the fundamental to me is what, what are you trying to sound like? And are you picking up what you intend to pick up? So violins and, and other acoustic instruments like that, they project, they, they make a lot of sound.
They make a sphere of sound that comes from the front of the instrument or the top of the instrument in the case of like a violin. And in say, like you're talking about a concert hall or a venue, like you mentioned, a contra dance or something like that, there's a lot of noise, right? There's, there's noise from the people having a great time.
There's noise from your cohort to your left and right that are probably also playing fairly loud instruments. And so we talk about isolation being a really important part of this. There's two. Really different acoustic environment sort of that. I like to think about there's like the most controlled environment, which is a studio, and it's they've spent thousands of dollars on on sound absorption to stop unnoticed, you know, or very noticeable.
I should say reflections and things like that. If you ever gone into a parking garage and clapped your hands or yelled real loud or, you know, even your shower, you're hearing all these reverberations and you may not want those, right? So That is, but that is a perfect environment. You're in a studio, it's controlled.
Then we talk about the exact opposite. You're yeah, you're in a big hall. There's tons of stuff happening. And it comes down to focus. So I, I like to think the very nicest sound off than you can get is in a room that you can control because you can capture the room and that's, is where I come back to my point of, of instruments being a room and the room being a room and the same way speakers or microphones and vice versa.
So This is a particular one, but I'm sure a few people will resonate this. If you have a violin on stage and it's, it's real loud and say you have a pickup in that instrument and you got monitors and there's other things happening, the top of your violin becomes a microphone and you start hearing extraneous noise coming through the top of your instrument.
Back into your sound and going out. And that's the most extreme example, right? You hear electric guitar is the same way. If you take an electric guitar and you put it in a loud enough room, you'll start to hear things in the room through the, the guitar. So I, I often think you like, what is the, the, how loud are you?
We have the burn. This, this venue in Boston that's known as an Irish arts kind of a, a, a, you know, a, it's almost a time capsule you could say. And one of the mainstays about this venue is it's. Real freaking loud in there. It's, it's deafening. You go in, I'm, I have earplugs in the moment. I step in that building and my sound scenario in there is as narrow as it can be.
I need the very, very, you know, most pointed, I just need to be able to hear the instrument. I can't pick up anything. Microphones almost go out the window when you talk about a venue like that. And, and the company that, that, that I work for that has been my test. Can I run our system with microphones in there and actually.
You have it be, you know, not picking up the, you know, Joe Schmo sitting at the bar yelling about, you know, the last pint he just drank. And then the, the exact opposite being in my home studio here, somewhere like that. I go down into, into my my studio. I have microphones that their entire purpose is just to pick up the sound of the room.
They're picking up as much sound as possible, right? So you got to know your, know your environment, know the instruments you're working with, and most importantly, know the musicians, what they want and understand that everyone's sound, what they hear in their head or what they want to hear in their head is so different.
And there's no one size, one shoe fit all kind of situation. You can get the best microphone in the world in the wrong scenario. And it's going to sound, it's going to sound bad.
As you can hear, there are about a thousand things I could talk about with Branesh on this podcast. It took a while of us going back and forth to settle on this topic, but I think it's super interesting because you don't hear much about the challenges of audio in the folk scene. Back in episode 22, I interviewed Bridget Hawley, an audio engineer who does software.
I learned so much about how music happens in the digital space, and if you're enjoying this episode, you might want to go back and listen to episode 22. One of the things Bridget mentioned was the limitations of hardware. I love how Brennish is working on that side of the puzzle, and Bridget is working on a slightly different but tangentially related side of the puzzle, and all of it is geared towards people having a good listening experience.
If you want to hear my thoughts about this, head over to zeitgeistacademy. com slash radio and sign up for my newsletter. That's Z E I T G E I S T academy. com slash radio.
**Morgan:** I think the other thing that plays into this, if you haven't played in an amplified setting before you may not realize , how important it is to be able to hear your, like, there's, there's the mix that the audience hears, but then there's the mix that you hear through your own monitors, not just being able to hear yourself, but being able to hear your bandmates at a level where you can kind of keep track of what, you know, how everybody's doing.
You're playing together. If someone starts to run away with it, because I mean, I've, I've been on stages where someone has like Started to run away with it because they don't hear us or vice versa. So where in this in this acoustic world, again, it's very, very different, I'm sure, depending on the situation, but do you take, do you manage that sort of thing as well?
Like not just projecting for the audience, but also the monitors reflecting back to the musicians.
**Brennish:** Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I think about an awful lot being a recording guy, right? So being somebody who does recorded music often where you do multi track. So, the invention of multi track is fairly new.
We're talking 1970s, 1980s maybe earlier than 1960s. But the, the notion that you can just hit a button and record two things at the same time is, is great, but only if you can hear the thing you just recorded well. So I'm always thinking about monitoring and headphones and being able to hear monitors on stage.
I think about if I go back in time again to my sort of my Roman analogy there's the idea that you have, there's the audio that the, the participants outside of the audience basically can hear that's projected audio and that's really important. That needs to sound. That's your final product, right?
That needs to be sort of the, the not not sterile. It needs to be lively. It needs to be dynamic. And that side of things had a lot of facilitation as far as, you know, the shape of the room and having the, you know, there's this history of things like Heimholtz resonators, there's a lot of nerdy stuff here, but Devices essentially to make the sound coming off of a stage is rich as possible for the audience.
Now, the opposite end of that is the musicians or the performers being able to hear each other. And often that is sterile and is picked apart from necessarily what the audience is hearing. So In a modern scenario like this, you know, on stage, you might have monitor wedges or something like this that are speakers placed on the floor that are delivering you a custom mix.
That's, that's, you know, say I need to hear a bit more of the guitar player. You'd always see people in sound checks going, you know, putting their thumbs up, thumbs down saying, Hey, I need to hear more of this or that or less of this or that. And that's what will, you know, really drives a good performance in a modern scenario.
Now. There are plenty of venues that have perfect acoustics. This is a thing that exists and I've played them and sometimes it's the last place you'd expect. I remember I played a Rotary Club once that had just a, they had a divider wall hanging from the ceiling and it was in the perfect spot and I could hear everything, you know, it was some of the best playing that I had ever, you know, with, with my own father.
I think there's a, a real focus that I, I, myself. See a need for in building locations that are good to play in as the musicians and where you don't necessarily need things like monitors, the more that you can do that yourself, the better. There's another great example of this. There's a, a festival I go to in California up in the high Sierras and This festival is known for acoustic music only.
And I, what I mean by that is that we don't just play music that is meant for acoustic instruments. We will also take music that is meant for electric instruments and bring it to an acoustic volume on purpose. And, and so that we, it forces people to be quiet, you know, it forces people to listen, to sit there and listen to some of this stuff.
And they want to listen for the record, but we have a, these beautiful venues there were. A lot of time and care has been spent to make it a joy to play on those stages. And whether that be, you know, angled ceilings or tapestries to give the bounce sound back at the, the musicians we have these venues called bus stops that look like a bus stop.
But the top of it is angled in such a way so the sound hits it comes back to you in a, in a nice amount of time. So it sounds, makes the sound much bigger than it is. These little tiny venues, but the sound sounds humongous when you're sitting in them. And a lot of care has been put into that and it's not the kind of thing that's readily obvious, right?
So that's sort of, you know, the acoustic side of it. And now I'd say that the modern, real modern side of it that I'm, I'm getting into a lot. Comes from this need for longevity. And what I mean by that is there's a, the medical issue that comes from playing music and then that is hearing damage.
Right. And it's kind of an obvious one. Tinnitus plagues a lot of musicians. Certainly plagues a lot of rock and metal and hardcore, that kind of thing where you have law, loud drums, you have loud bass, things like that. And I meet so many of these guys who are, you know, in their early twenties, mid twenties that have, you know, irreversible hearing damage from playing in loud gigs.
So I personally, I have. A vested interest in wanting my friends and my peers and myself to be able to keep using our ears as long as possible. So a lot of people in, in at this point are switching to in ear monitors and the idea they're just basically fancy, you know, Apple earbuds or something like that.
But with the focus being isolation. So they act as earplugs as well. They, they stop all that external noise coming in. And then the internal, you know, the sound quality is good and you can have the volume levels that are reasonable rather than stacking volume. So monitors, when you have a monitor on stage, you run into all sorts of problems.
Number one. Say you have loud instruments, you gotta crank those monitors above the, the instrument level. Say you got a big, you know, audience that's cheering and whooping and hollering, again, those monitors are going up in volume, right? And you're just creating more and more and more damage every time you, you add another layer to that.
So having monitoring and being able to hear yourself on stage as quietly as possible, I think is one of my personal interests is yeah, avoiding, you know, how long can we play this music? If I can't hear when I'm 65 years old, how am I going to play, you know? So.
**Morgan:** . Yeah. And in the folk community, 65 is young.
Yeah,
**Brennish:** exactly. I love it.
**Morgan:** I could ask you a million questions about what we just what you just said, but let's Move along and there's a question. There's a, there's a term I would like you to define if you don't mind. What is live sound engineering?
**Brennish:** So live sound engineering is creating worthwhile sound in a live environment, a non controlled environment.
That means reacting to things around you, working with venues, working with, Hey, you know, somebody needs a microphone to make an announcement. You know, it's something as simple as that. Something as complex as, Hey, I have a giant metal boxy room. And I need to use, use my engineering skills and the academic side of things to produce an accurate sound and a big giant reverberant room.
Right? So there's it's almost like being an audio handyman. And what I mean by that is. You know, when you are working in your own environment, you're working in a studio and you're an audio engineer, there's a lot of aerial variables, but many of them are totally controllable. And so being a live sound audio engineer means you're working with many variables outside of your own control.
And it means sort of having everything you would have as a recording engineer and more. Right. You also need to understand stage times and stage management and you know, musicians, you have to understand musicians, how, if somebody goes, I, to hell with that microphone, I'm not going to deal with this, that, or, you know, or a piece of gear malfunctioning.
All that comes down to you as the, as the live engineer facilitating the musicians on stage. All engineering, as far as audio goes, in my, my opinion comes down to how much of the barrier of entry can we knock down? We want a clean road, you know, to that, to that sound that we're hearing. And you don't want to have roadblocks in the way.
And so being an audio engineer is the jack of all trades is the way I describe it.
**Morgan:** And I think a lot of communities and again, I, I'm only speaking to the ones that I know of, but just an observation that I've made is this is a role that nobody really wants to do, but it's also super, super important.
And I think a lot of people are intimidated, you know, they see the soundboard and it's got all of these buttons and, and dials and, and sliders. But do you have any, like, thoughts to share or words of advice if someone is in a community, sees that, for example, it's the one same guy that's been doing sound for the past 40 years and there is no backup for people who need, who would like these communities to continue what are some, some, like, pieces that you would maybe just advise for people who, who see that need or maybe thinking about it and, you know, Mildly interested, but still intimidated.
**Brennish:** Yeah. I mean, it is a dying breed. I think you hit the nail right on the head there. Audio engineering is in one sense, gotten a lot more accessible. So it's a lot easier these days to just become your own engineer, you know, getting both when it comes out of recording and having a home studio much easier now also live sounds a lot easier now Equipment's just cheaper and we're, we've moved away from custom British or, or, you know, engineered giant 500, 000 consoles that only like two people in the world now that use.
Now you can have a lot of those same features just right in your desktop for a couple hundred bucks. So There's sort of that side of things where it's become more abundant, but on the other side of the real technical side of things yeah, you're right. There's a lot less interest in it. And a lot of that comes down to the time investment.
You know, it's a lot of time to learn how to do this stuff. And I think if I was gonna frame it one of the things that I think about a lot is that I'm as a sound engineer, my goal is to make the music as good as I can. And, and if you think of it from a technical point of view how can I make it sound the very cleanest or, you know, we use words like warm and clean and, and, you know transparent, things like that.
You, you Get bored kind of quick, even if you're real, you know, you're really in the weeds with it. Getting into the technical side of things, I think, is a personal interest and an interest that a lot of people have that are nerdy and aren't that kind of thing. But I often like to think about this, especially when talking to younger people and trying to get people into this kind of thing.
But, That what we really need to do, we need people that want to make the music good. You know, we want people to be heard. Right. So and it's just a means to an end and something like live sound. I think about in our communities, there's plenty of need for live sound. That's not as high stakes as, you know, running the board for the Rolling Stones or something, right?
Yeah. When we think about you're in a big concert, you are mission control. You are NASA piloting the giant rocket that's trying to land on the moon and not You know, crash and kill the whole band that's trying to get through their set. Right. So that's a real crazy thing, but the more approachable thing is like, Hey, we have a town hall or we got a church or we got a, you know, a meeting place.
People want to be heard. And I know that I found a lot of my, my initial knowledge and things. And even now I do this a lot through those types of venues going and helping people facilitate. So we talk about somebody, we have a, we have a local a couple of churches that, that want to, you know, they want to get sound to their, to their parishioners and things, or they have have a couple of UU churches too, that do dances and things here.
And they're really just looking to, to, you know, make their events as good as they possibly can. They don't want to be thinking about the technical side of things. And they're often very forgiving because they don't know a lot. You know, if you're, if you're doing this kind of stuff, so you're a pastor or something, you may not know a lot, or say you're a local band or a bar or something, you know, you, again, you're not thinking about the sound much.
So I like to reach out and get those types of gigs. Those are great ones to start with, find a, a, you know, local venues that just need somebody. Cause like not every place has got the guy who's been working there, or maybe the guy who's been working there 50 years, wants somebody to talk to about all the stuff he's doing and wants a little bit of help.
So It's definitely a guarded, a somewhat guarded profession, but at the same time people in this industry really appreciate when you're into what they do and it's so necessary that I think it's a, it's a worthwhile thing to dive into.
**Morgan:** Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. I guarantee if you go.
To a local contra dance and you tell them that you are interested in sound. They will mentor you every single dance until you are,
**Brennish:** even if it's just pulling
**Morgan:** cable, even if it's, Oh, that's yep. Yep. Even if it's just, just setting up and tearing down, there's a lot of moving pieces. Thank you. Can you describe some of these microphone systems that you've designed for these acoustic rooms and areas?
**Brennish:** Yeah, sure. So when I came and found the company I worked for, You're Heaven Audio back at Folk Alliance my need at the time was I wanted a transparent system for my violin. I take, a lot of care in my own sound and trying to acoustically play what I'm hearing in my head. And I'm somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of gear often when I play on stage in the sense that I have a lot of junk, but I don't, my sound is fairly authentic to the natural instrument sound.
**Morgan:** Yeah. Can you describe really quick before you keep going, what you mean by transparent?
**Brennish:** Yeah. So Acoustic instruments, especially things like violins are meant to sound good from the start. Something like an electric guitar often has what they call a clean sound, which is the sound right out of the guitar.
But then you're augmenting it. So you're running it through pedals. So you have distortions and you have reverbs and delays and all these, you know, technical terms that, that basically describe just things, effects that change the sound, right. And that might also go into an amp and go into et cetera, et cetera.
Right. So. If we go back to, to acoustic instruments like violins and guitars and things like this, they have this already fantastic sound, right? To start with, because some, you know, someone has spent an unbelievable amount of time, you know, coming up with this beautiful shape that, that produces sound accurately.
I mean, there's a reason if you look at almost any violin in the world if it's not a modern design, probably has a fake Guarneri or a fake Stradivarius sticker in it, right? That's because there's sort of that golden sound. So. Rather than take what's broken and try to fix it, I was looking for transparency.
I wanted it to sound I want my violin to sound like my violin. I spent time and money and plenty years of practice to sound the way that I do. And I'm not trying to, to, to throw that off by putting something crummy into my instrument. So, a, Problem that I see all the time with music is people with that are, have beautiful playing and the beautiful musicians beautiful instruments and, and et cetera, et cetera.
But they have a system that, that, you know, almost, you know, mischaracterizes their music. In the sense, it's not authentic to maybe, and maybe they like it. It's authentic to what they hear, but a lot of acoustic musicians, I see this where they, they have a beautiful instrument and it sounds fantastic.
If you hear it. In a small venue where you can actually hear it, but as soon as you run it through a PA, you lose the nuances of it. So. When I approached my own personal amplification, I wanted something that was as accurate of a reproduction of my own instrument sound as possible. So this system that we've designed here at Your Heaven is exactly that.
The whole idea and notion of it is that it actually takes almost an imprint of what your instrument sounds like when you first set it up. And that is what it uses to create the sound. Take the sound that it's actually gathering and reproduce it. It's taking it and cross referencing that with, well, here's what this violin is meant to be sound like in a room, right?
So it was a simple notion, but, but real genius. And and that came from our, our founder. So Steve Schwartz, who's the founder of your heaven audio He grew up in Providence and his family owned a mill below Audio Technica's laboratories. And so when he was a kid, he would go into the mill and he would play, he was very, you know, a knack for mechanical things, and he'd be up messing around, and they realized that at a pretty young age, you know, these, these smart guys let him come and screw around in their labs.
And what he eventually kind of, long story short, led to To the idea that you can make whole room microphones, whole room speakers. So this is called transducers where they, you basically, it's like a puck and you attach it to a surface and you can make a wall into a speaker, a chair, or any, you know, any object.
You can sort of turn them into speakers. And the same thing with, with rooms, you can take a room and make it into a microphone room. It's just a big fiddle. When you really think about it, it's. Maybe not as meticulously designed as a violin, but it's a big chamber air moves in and out of it somehow, unless it's completely sealed.
And if you can control that, you can control the sound. And if you can learn what a room in quotes here looks like sonically, you can often. Change that to sound more like you want. So the notion was that if he could do, if he could do room correction, essentially make speakers sound better in a room with some fancy math maybe that would work for instruments too.
So he took that same notion, just a very flat microphone in an instrument. And with some fancy math. You can, you can take what is, you know maybe a bad sounding signal, which is sticking a mic right on an instrument. If you've ever used a microphone and, and stuck it, you know maybe in your ear, your ears is a mic in this case, you stick your ear right on a fiddle and you play some loud stuff.
It's going to sound like a saw being driven across your ear. So, but taking that, there's a lot of good information there, right? It just needs to develop and that. That develop the developing sound is something that you can actually keep track of with a lot of math. So yeah, we make systems that are just trying to make, you know, if you have a 5, 000 guitar, it's going to sound like your 5, 000 guitar, but if you have a 10 guitar, you got out of flea market somewhere, it's going to.
Sound like the 5 guitar. You got a fleet market, which is what we want, right? Transparency,
**Morgan:** right? My brain is exploding from so many things in that this is awesome. This is such an interesting way to think about sound. I've, I have never thought about things that way before. So in some sense the room, yes.
As far as, you know, being a choral singer and resonance is obviously of an important part in choral singing especially acapella. So understanding the room is part of the instrument like that makes sense to me, but there are so many other things so you're taking these. So in the example of you playing your violin, you are you saying that your microphone like you put it directly on?
Is it like sticky? You wouldn't want to put something sticky like or does it collect like clamp on? Yeah,
**Brennish:** well, so this is a great question because this is actually what I did. Yeah. Personally do at the company. So I came to the company having bought their systems on the show floor and being very happy with the sound.
And the other side of that is what we talked about earlier. What is transparent as far as visual and, and being when you're on stage. What is easy? What facilitates making music? So I found that there were, there were complications in the mechanics of it, how the mics went on the instruments, how cabling worked, that sort of stuff, the fixtures, the physical hardware that actually interfaces with your instrument.
So I modified some of that stuff. And that was what. ultimately got me the job there. And so now my, my technical title is I'm an R and D specialist, but focusing on performance. So I, I design fixtures, I design connectors and that sort of thing. So the mics of the violin system, it's pretty simple. It goes, the micro is actually In the little F hole on the instrument.
And the, the connection is terminated on the back of the violin with a tiny little connector and some rubber straps to keep everything the instrument safe, there's nothing permanent. And there's nothing that can damage the instrument. So that's a big part of, of my own work too, here is there's a lot of folks that have instruments that they don't want to damage.
They don't want to you know. Add in, you talk about sticky stuff. We don't want to glue. We don't want to screw. We don't want to do anything like that. We don't want to permanently modify our instruments and. You know, guitar players are often used to that with guitar systems. We've had for years to drill into the bridge and make new saddles and make jack ends on the, in the side of the guitar.
My own personal guitar being no, except for this, I have two separate jacks on the side of my instrument and probably three pounds of gear in that instrument, but the The idea is with all these things, we, we want to design microphone systems that didn't require modification. So that has been an incredibly difficult task.
How do you, you know, how do we replace what has been a traditional means of doing things? If you've seen any violin pickup system in the last 50 years, they typically have a big clamp that goes on the side of the instrument that you plug a jack in. And that while that's reliable it doesn't facilitate the sound.
It looks pretty bad. Strange. You certainly don't want to leave something like that on a priceless instrument for too long because you're going to cause issues. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons for this type of thing. And to say that they came up with a good design originally is accurate. I mean, that's a usable thing, right?
So, but reinventing the wheel in a way that doesn't tread over usability, but still facilitates, you know, using it on stage and not having it break. These are complicated tasks. That I've approached from a very modern standpoint with, with 3d printing and laser cutting, and, and a lot of emergent technologies to try to to bring it to a a modern place violins were cutting edge when they came out, right?
So it's, we can, we can bring some, some nuance and some technology into the the, the side of things now.
**Morgan:** What types of instruments do you design for?
**Brennish:** So we primarily design things for instruments that I would call roomable instruments. So I was talking about the idea of, of micing rooms and whole room transducers and things.
So similarly, a violin, a guitar, cello, bass, those types of instruments. For sure. Banjos have been something that we're working on now too. You know, we, we talk about an open back banjo. It doesn't sort of like a room in this sort of, it's a room without a ceiling, right? You have an open back, but when it's against your body, now you have a room, right?
So these types of things any instrument that is like that we've designed for. So we've even made drum, you know, a drum as a big room, you know, we've made piano. A piano is a beautiful room, right? In a real costly room. You want them accurately reproduce sound in. And we're expanding to other things now, but we, we've worked with, with all sorts of stuff.
So just, you know, an hour before this, this interview here, I was working on a mic system for a double neck guitar. Someone in Brazil who has just the wildest looking thing you've ever seen. And most traditional systems just Won't even approach, you know, accurately pre producing its sound. So for us, this has sort of been our the cream of our crop.
We love building these little custom things. We even had something as extreme as a glass harmonium. You know, how, how on earth do you make a glass harmonium? Well, we figured it out. So yeah, we, we, we like a challenge.
**Morgan:** This is so fun. So let's take a step back here. into the shoes of, of some of us who may not understand, you know, we've learned a lot today but then we go forth into the world.
If I enter an acoustic setting or if someone listening enters an acoustic setting what are some things that that you, that people can look for, you know, just to make a more, you know, educated, like you look at the room and you just kind of to know what's going on a little bit more in a way that you didn't before.
What are some things that people can look for? Especially likely there'll be some kind of live sound engineering going on. But, but what are some things that you think the average person, it would be cool if they were noticing.
**Brennish:** Yeah. So, you know, from my perspective as someone who's done sound for people, but who.
I've also been, you know, the musician on stage you know, trying to work with an engineer who's trying to communicate things. The main thing I think is verbiage. I, there's a lot of verbiage related to live sound that folks just don't know. And that, you know, I don't necessarily expect them to, but a little goes a long way, you know knowing things like gain and the idea of volume goes a tremendous distance.
You know, when we're talking about the, there's the, the nerdy technical side of audio. is making sure you have enough of a signal where you want the signal and not where you don't want it. Right? So being able to explain to your engineer you know, I want more of this or less of that. It goes a huge distance and less is more.
And a lot of cases with, with. I think a lot fundamentally when I get to any gig, my first thought is, well, what looks good? And I go back to those principles of, you know, the amplitheater, the idea that if I'm playing in a, in a spot, that's going to push my sound out naturally, that is going to do a lot towards my own, you know, my, my sound on stage as much as any microphone or any speaker.
Well, right. So. You know, I'm lucky to be blessed. I play in a lot of venues that have pretty darn good acoustics. But there's certainly the gigs you get where you're playing in a big box with carpets and low floors and the whole thing. And then at that point, then you're, you're coming down to, yeah, do we have the focus sound?
Do we have mics that are not going to pick up the extraneous stuff? And knowing things about like feedback, if you push a mic too hard and you have your speakers close to it, you know, you're going to feed back. Knowing that yeah, their room again is a big instrument. So when you play, you know, audio into a room, you have a PA and you're making noise, you're exciting everything in that room.
If you have a room with metal walls and a low ceiling, you're going to get lots of reverb and high frequency, weird stuff. Say you're playing in a room, it's a big theater. You know, it resonates like crazy or a cathedral or something like this. I work with people who do choral singing and others, things like that.
In I've done organ work too, and in huge, huge rooms, and then it's, it's the opposite problem. So that was too much sound. There's too much. There's a lot of a good thing. But how can we reign it back? So know your space when I get into a space. And as long as there's not too many eyes on me, I might. Clap, roll out, or make some hoops or hollers or something, right?
Walk around the room. In audio recording, we think about it all the time, but in live recording, the same thing goes. If your instrument sounds good and if you walk around and you play it and you like the sound of it, chances are it might be the spot, you know? And we can't always rely on, you know, maybe the best sounding spot is the least aesthetically pleasing spot, but there's a balance there.
And I think of all that way before I bring a mic, you know, onto my stage. Yeah, and, and keeping things simple for your audio engineer. If I can have, you know, the least amount of things that I have to hand to him and have him know, you know, if you know, simple terms like, do I need a DI? Do I have mic level signals?
Do I have line level signals? Even just things like, what is my cable? Do I have a cord? You know, a quarter inch cable or an XLR or something like that. There's, you know, there's a whole lot of things in the audio world, but the stuff you end up using on stage, there's not a huge, huge amount of technical jargon you need to know, but the fundamentals really help.
And your audio engineer will thank you tremendously.
**Morgan:** And I can tell everyone that if I can learn all of that stuff, you absolutely can learn all of that stuff. Awesome. Well, I could, I could obviously pick your brain for so much longer, but we do wrap it up. I've asked this, I guess every guest, the same question at the end, because I think ultimately making music is all about bringing things to life.
Right. So I'm going to ask you what was a recent or memorable zeitgeist moment for you? Zeitgeist means spirit of the times. And basically that's a term I've coined in, in lack of knowing any other term for that moment where you are, you're making music and you just hit that you'd like you plug into something bigger than yourself and think like the scene or the music or something about it just comes alive for you.
And I think that's. That's the moment we all seek as musicians. It's the moment we seek as people who go to see live music or people who are in any point facilitating that connection of, of making music. I'll give you an example of, of one of mine. So I grew up in Montana and I also come from a family of musicians, been making music since, since the womb, basically.
And absolutely some of the most magical moments in my life, zeitgeist moments, where we're around a campfire. Making music on acoustic instruments with the beautiful like stars of, you know, just the, the sky just spread out above you. There's little light pollution out there in the mountains and you're just out there playing around a fire.
Someone's singing, the coals have kind of gone down and everyone's, you know, maybe there was a rock party earlier. That's also very fun, but now things, they kind of hit this calm. And you got some folks noodling on guitars. You've got maybe a vocals, you just kind of whatever people bring these acoustic instruments.
And that to me is one of the absolute most magical things that you can do in music is. Is, is reached that point in the night where there's,
Yeah. So that's, that's an example of what to me, like a moment where music just like I plug into something higher than myself in that, in that moment. But I would love to hear from you, Brennish.
What is, what is a recent or a memorable Zeitgeist moment for you?
**Brennish:** Yeah. So I, I really resonated a lot with what you just said. I, I have had many of those moments. It's luckily. Throughout my life. I mean, I consider myself really blessed to, to have, you know, I have spent a lot of time. A time playing under the stars and around a fire playing in someone's living room and having those kind of magical moments.
I, I, I think of three or four that come to mind, but one that I think that stands out in particular had a moment last year where it's at the, the Clifftop Appalachian String Band Festival in West Virginia. So it's a big meeting of the minds. There's thousands of folks come down for 10 days of old time music.
There's. Fiddle contests and dance contests and just square dancing in general and a jam every 15 feet. That's one of the mainstays of this festival, right? So we had a moment where in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there's a lot of rain, very humid out there. We had a moment where we had kind of, The things kind of came together.
Somebody wanted to do a session with this person. And this person is everyone's always seeking each other out. As you imagine, you have three or 4000 people all running around. Everybody wants to play with everybody and not everything happens, right? But there's these moments of serendipity where things kind of come together.
So We had a kind of a meeting of three or four people went, oh, we wanna play. And they, each of us kind of went out and grabbed another person. And let's see if I can name ev everybody here. There was it was
myself or, or my friend Kate Gregory Brendan Hearn let's see who's, so we have a fiddle.
I'm fiddle. Kate's fiddle. Brendan's a, a cello player. We had another two fantastic players Alan and let's see here. Who else was it? It was Alan and oh, it was M and Rachel Eddie. And who else was it? The Carrs, basically the Carr family. Jane and Alan Rothfield.
I think that's everybody. Anyway, long story short, these are the people who know who what I'm talking about will know the combination of people that we've assembled here. But we had this group of musicians that spontaneously came together. Under a single tent, we were under, you know, a closed wall tent and the moment we stepped in thunderstorm, big thunderstorm, you know, talk about, you know, being in the right place at the right time though, here we are trapped with some of our favorite people all in one spot.
And we played for, I don't know, five, seven hours or something straight. Just, we didn't stop. We tuned our instruments to the same tuning and we just, you know, This ethereal fiddle orchestra, it felt like something out of a dream. You know, we were all, we could hear each other talking about acoustics.
This tent had a beautiful dome top, you know, credit to Rachel and them. They spent the money and they got a beautiful tent. We could hear each other fantastically. It sounded like I was in a studio and we all, you know, we all afterwards that man, if only we had a mic running in the center of this room, it would have been, we'd have had a record right there, but that moment of, of sitting And you're confined.
There's nothing else I can do. Nothing else I really want to do either, right? It's raining. I'm, I'm in this, I'm in this tent. We all know these same tunes. That's the beauty of traditional and folk music. We all know these tunes. And even when somebody suggested a tune that none of us knew, they're the perfect length to learn, right?
And so we were able to, I learned five or six new tunes. Janie played some of her own tunes that we, we had never heard before that she had written. Again, short and sweet. We can learn these things pretty quick, but And what you get there is just we all were one mind by the end of it just beaming with joy, you know, we just we came out of that session.
I felt my heart was full for almost the whole summer that gave me a, you know, a kick to keep going, you know, to keep pushing through. There's all, you know, there's lots of craziness always happened in the world. But when I, you know, Whenever I get to those moments of, of unrest, I think about things like we made that thing happen and we were just locked in I, and those moments, I had another one in the Caribbean recently with a bunch of Irish musicians playing, you know, they're totally different changes scenery, but yeah, it's still hot and humid, but yeah, everybody playing together and, and knowing the same tunes and just, that is something so magical about this kind of music that we can.
Play it together. There's common repertoire and that it's far more than just the music. It's that we're, it's another, just yet another way for us to all connect together.
**Morgan:** I love that so much. Brennish, thank you so much for being on my podcast. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for
**Brennish:** having me.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Zeitgeist Radio. If you'd like to take the next step in your musical journey, head over to zeitgeistacademy. com slash radio to join my newsletter. Seriously. It's fun and informative, and I never spam or sell your information. That's zeitgeistacademy. com slash radio.
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