After all these years, this is still my favorite month in western Massachusetts. Slow down, take a walk, and look up while it lasts. It goes by fast.
#Granby #WesternMass #FallInNewEngland #October
We started at approximately 10:00 AM with a simple objective: consolidate an existing Facebook Page under the same business management account as several other Pages. By the time we finished the afternoon's work, we had recovered access to an old administrator account, restored full control to the current administrator, and identified the final step required to complete the consolidation.
That last step, naturally, is subject to a seven-day waiting period.
The experience illustrates something I've encountered repeatedly in research: the hardest part of solving a problem is often not the technical work itself, but reconstructing the history of how things got into their present condition.
Facebook Pages accumulate administrative history. People create Pages using personal accounts, add other administrators, change profiles, reorganize businesses, and sometimes forget which account originally controlled what.
Over time, those arrangements can become surprisingly difficult to untangle.
In this case, the Page was still accessible through a current Facebook profile. Content could be published, messages could be managed, and ordinary administrative tasks were available. But the current administrator did not have full control.
That distinction matters.
Facebook separates permissions for everyday Page management from permissions to assign administrators, change access, or delete the Page. Someone can appear to be an administrator while lacking the authority to transfer or reorganize the Page.
The account holding full control was an older Facebook identity that hadn't been used in years.
The first obstacle was recovering that older Facebook account.
We had a working telephone number associated with it, which allowed us to begin the login process. But Facebook required an additional verification code sent to an unfamiliar, partially obscured email address.
That created a classic account-recovery puzzle: we knew the account existed, we had one valid authentication method, but the final verification depended on identifying a forgotten mailbox.
We searched through old records, saved credentials, email correspondence, and the history of accounts created for other online projects.
Eventually, the missing address turned up in records connected to an entirely different project from years earlier.
That was the breakthrough.
Once the email account was identified and accessed, we could receive the verification code and complete the Facebook login.
The important lesson wasn't that we guessed the right address. We didn't. We reconstructed enough of the account's history to find it.
Recovering the original administrator account solved only half the problem.
The next task was granting the current administrator full control.
Facebook's interface showed the existing permissions clearly enough, but offered no obvious way to upgrade the current administrator's access. The available menu offered removal, not editing.
Attempting to add the same administrator again didn't work either.
We eventually established a workable sequence: retain the original administrator's full control, remove the current administrator's limited access, and then invite that administrator back with full control enabled.
After accepting the new invitation, the current administrator had the necessary Page permissions.
This is precisely the sort of procedure that should be straightforward and well documented. Instead, we had to discover it by working through the interface and testing what Facebook would actually permit.
With full administrative access restored, we attempted to add the Page to the existing Meta business portfolio.
Facebook refused.
This time, however, it provided a specific explanation: an administrator who has held the role for less than seven days cannot approve certain requests to add a Page to a Business Manager account.
The restriction expires on October 18.
This wasn't a failed recovery. It was a security waiting period imposed after a successful permissions change.
That's an important distinction. We now know what needs to happen, who has the authority to do it, and when the remaining operation can be completed.
The investigation took hours because several independent systems had to be understood together: Facebook account recovery, old email records, Page-level permissions, business portfolio ownership, and Meta's security waiting periods.
Along the way, we established a practical recovery method:
Identify which Facebook account actually holds full Page control.
Reconstruct forgotten account credentials using existing records and legitimate recovery methods.
Preserve access to the original administrator while making changes.
Distinguish limited Page access from full administrative control.
Where necessary, replace limited access with a new full-control invitation.
Verify the new administrator's permissions before attempting a business portfolio transfer.
Account for Meta's seven-day restriction on newly appointed administrators.
Complete the business portfolio consolidation after the restriction expires.
This is now a procedure we can reuse.
Much of investigative research consists of solving problems that don't have a convenient answer waiting on the first page of a search engine.
The information exists, but it is scattered across systems, old records, account histories, obscure settings, and incomplete documentation.
Today's work wasn't glamorous. It didn't involve an unsolved historical mystery or a missing document in a forgotten archive.
It involved Facebook.
But the underlying skills were the same: persistence, careful recordkeeping, testing hypotheses, following evidence, and refusing to confuse an obstacle with a dead end.
We also used AI assistance throughout the process, not simply to produce instructions, but to evaluate each new obstacle, identify alternatives, and work toward a solution.
The result is more than recovered access to a Facebook Page. It's a documented method that could save someone else hours of frustration.
If you're dealing with an old Facebook Page, an inaccessible administrator account, confusing Meta Business Suite permissions, or a business portfolio that refuses to accept a Page, Adam Sweet Research may be able to help.
Sometimes the solution is already there. The work is finding the path to it.
I've been experimenting with AI agents lately, particularly Clara (ChatGPT) and Dex (Hark). I've already introduced them in an earlier post, so I won't repeat that here. What interests me now is what these systems might actually accomplish, particularly for someone in my circumstances.
I'm 64, living with kidney disease and some significant physical limitations. I currently am immobile, and I don't have a car available. Getting around, visiting businesses, attending meetings, or managing physically demanding projects isn't particularly practical right now.
But there's nothing wrong with my mind. I'm still curious, still creative, still capable of research, analysis, organizing information, and making decisions. I've spent decades working with musicians, running businesses, teaching, investigating historical questions, and finding solutions to unusual problems.
What I need isn't an AI that thinks for me. I need an AI that can do the legwork.
Most business ideas involve some combination of money, inventory, transportation, physical labor, and personal supervision.
I've recently reconsidered several possibilities, including selling musical instrument supplies, running a booking agency, and expanding existing projects.
The obstacles aren't necessarily a lack of knowledge or customers. They're practical.
Selling bow hair, for example, requires purchasing merchandise, inspecting quality, preparing samples, packaging shipments, and following up with customers. Even if the product is excellent, someone has to physically handle it.
A music booking agency has a different problem. Finding performance venues is relatively straightforward compared with finding dependable musicians who meet my standards and can fulfill engagements independently.
An AI agent might help with both businesses, but it cannot eliminate every obstacle. If a project requires me to drive somewhere, carry inventory, or supervise unreliable people, automation hasn't really solved the problem.
That's an important lesson: A business isn't practical simply because an AI can help administer it.
Yesterday, Dex demonstrated some interesting capabilities.
It researched music-related Facebook groups, identified communities where professional musicians might be found, and prepared recruitment material. It assembled a shortlist of potential performers.
It also worked on five existing Google spreadsheets containing venue information, booking contacts, research exceptions, and outreach records. The spreadsheets were reportedly updated and checked, although the overall assignment was not completed.
We explored AgentLine, which offers AI agents telephone numbers and calling capabilities. The possibility of an AI making business calls, verifying contact information, and following up on inquiries is particularly interesting. We haven't yet tested a completed call, but the technology suggests a new kind of remote administrative assistant.
There were limitations, too. Facebook security verification interrupted posting, some account connections were troublesome, and the database assignment remained unfinished.
These weren't complete successes. They were demonstrations of what might be possible, along with reminders that reliability matters more than impressive claims.
Consider the kinds of tasks that don't actually require my physical presence.
An agent could investigate a historical mystery, locate archival references, search public records, identify people or organizations with relevant information, and organize the findings into a report.
It could maintain a database, check whether businesses are still operating, identify missing information, and prepare contact lists.
With appropriate telephone and email access, it might contact organizations, ask routine questions, arrange appointments, request documents, and follow up on unanswered inquiries.
It could help manage correspondence, keep track of ongoing projects, organize research notes, and remind me when something needs a decision.
For music, it might identify promising performers, research venues, locate licensing or publishing opportunities, and prepare information for people interested in using my recordings.
These are not all demonstrated capabilities of my current setup. Some are possibilities worth testing. But they share an important characteristic: they involve information and communication rather than physical labor.
That's where I see the greatest potential.
One of the more intriguing possibilities is giving an AI agent its own telephone number.
A great deal of useful information still isn't available online. Sometimes the only way to find out who handles bookings, whether a business is operating, or who maintains an old archive is to call someone.
I've done this kind of research myself for years. It works, but it consumes time and energy.
Imagine an agent that can make a series of routine inquiries, record the answers accurately, identify conflicting information, and present me with a concise report.
I could then decide which leads deserve personal attention.
The agent wouldn't replace my judgment. It would extend my reach.
Of course, it would need to identify itself appropriately, respect people's preferences, and report what was actually said rather than inventing plausible answers.
A telephone that produces unreliable information isn't much use.
What I'm beginning to imagine is a small, home-based research operation in which I provide the questions, experience, curiosity, and judgment while AI agents handle much of the repetitive investigation and administration.
I could work on local history, archival mysteries, difficult-to-find information, business research, or other problems that interest me.
Some projects might be paid. Others might simply be worth solving.
The point wouldn't necessarily be to create another full-time business. At this stage of my life, I don't particularly want one.
I'd rather have the freedom to choose interesting problems and work on them at my own pace.
An effective agent could make that possible by handling tasks that would otherwise require travel, long telephone sessions, or hours of routine computer work.
This is where the distinction between artificial intelligence and robotics becomes interesting.
Today's software agents can potentially handle digital information and communications. They can't put merchandise in envelopes, drive to a meeting, or pick up supplies from a warehouse.
But what happens when these systems become connected to robots, delivery services, remote assistants, and other physical-world infrastructure?
Could someone eventually operate a small enterprise almost entirely from home, directing both digital and physical work?
Could a person with limited mobility run a research business, manage a farm operation, or supervise a specialized service without needing to be physically present?
Some pieces of that future already exist. Others remain experimental, expensive, or impractical.
I don't assume they'll all work. But the possibilities are worth investigating.
There's one major obstacle I keep encountering: AI systems are often better at describing what they can do than actually finishing the work.
Clara can discuss a business idea enthusiastically for hours, produce plans, and explain why something might succeed. But discussion isn't execution.
Dex can take more direct action, but its assignments can still end unfinished.
I've learned that an agent's work needs to be evaluated by its results, not by how confidently it reports them.
Did it make the call? Did it update the correct spreadsheet? Did it verify the information? Did the message actually get sent? What remains unfinished?
Those are the questions that matter.
I don't want to spend hours supervising an assistant that was supposed to save me time.
For someone with physical limitations, the promise of AI isn't that it will replace human intelligence.
It's that it might help separate what a person is capable of thinking and deciding from what their body currently allows them to do.
I still want to write music, read, research, investigate, and participate in the world. I have ideas, experience, and curiosity. What I don't have is unlimited energy, mobility, or money.
If AI agents can reliably handle the repetitive work, make routine inquiries, maintain records, and carry out clearly defined assignments, they could provide something more valuable than convenience.
They could provide greater independence.
That's what I'm interested in discovering.
Not whether an AI can imitate a human conversation.
Not whether it can produce another business plan.
But whether it can help a human being continue doing meaningful work when physical circumstances have changed.
For me, that's a much more compelling experiment.
On curiosity, forgotten information, and the peculiar satisfaction of solving problems that nobody assigned you.
There is an enormous amount of information in the world that isn't exactly lost. It's simply waiting for someone to become interested in it.
An old photograph sits in a box without names on the back. A property deed refers to a person whose identity has been forgotten. A newspaper mentions an event that never made it into the history books. Somewhere, an obscure musical instrument has a history that its present owner knows almost nothing about.
These things interest me.
I've spent much of my life following questions that weren't necessarily practical, profitable, or even particularly important to anyone else. Sometimes the investigation leads somewhere useful. Sometimes it leads to another question. Occasionally it leads to a discovery that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.
And sometimes the trail simply disappears.
That's part of the attraction.
One of the great misconceptions about research is that information is either available or unavailable. In reality, there's an enormous territory in between.
Consider an old photograph of a group of musicians. Nobody remembers their names. The photographer is unknown. There's no date.
At first glance, it seems impossible to identify them.
But perhaps one musician is holding an unusual instrument. Perhaps a building in the background has a distinctive architectural feature. Maybe the clothing suggests a particular decade, or the photograph contains a sign that can be partially deciphered.
An old newspaper advertisement might identify a dance orchestra that performed in that town. A historical society might have another photograph taken at the same location. A surviving concert program might supply the missing names.
Individually, these fragments mean very little. Together, they can begin to tell a story.
The trick isn't necessarily knowing where the answer is. It's recognizing which apparently insignificant details might lead toward it.
History is preserved by an extraordinary assortment of people, many of whom never intended to become historians.
Someone saves a box of family letters. A retired newspaper editor keeps decades of clippings. A musician records rehearsals on a cassette recorder. A town clerk carefully maintains records that nobody has requested in fifty years.
Then there are the collectors.
Collectors preserve things that institutions often overlook. Musical instruments, trade catalogs, old advertisements, correspondence, photographs, maps, and obsolete technical manuals can all become valuable historical evidence.
The Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, university special collections, local historical societies, and digitized newspaper collections have made remarkable amounts of this material accessible. Yet enormous quantities remain poorly indexed, misidentified, or entirely undigitized.
Sometimes the most useful discovery isn't the answer itself. It's finding the person who knows where the answer might be.
I've spent most of my life involved with music, and I've come to believe that musical experience provides some surprisingly useful preparation for investigative work.
A musician learns to recognize patterns.
When you're listening to an ensemble, you become aware of relationships between individual parts. A melody makes sense partly because of the harmony beneath it. A rhythmic phrase establishes expectations. When something unexpected happens, you notice.
Research often works the same way.
You assemble information from different sources and begin to recognize relationships. A date matches another date. Two names appear in separate records. A description contradicts something you thought you knew.
Sometimes the most interesting thing is what's missing.
In music, a rest can be as important as a note. In research, an absence can be equally revealing, although it isn't necessarily proof of anything.
Why does a particular name disappear from the records? Why does one account of an event differ from another? Why does a supposedly well-documented story seem to have no original source?
These are the moments when an investigation becomes interesting.
Of course, musicians also know the danger of hearing patterns that aren't really there. The human mind is extraordinarily good at constructing relationships, even when the evidence doesn't justify them.
A good researcher needs both imagination and skepticism.
Sometimes I wonder how many interesting discoveries never happen simply because nobody thinks to ask the question.
We tend to assume that important subjects have already been investigated. If something is worth knowing, surely somebody must have written about it.
But importance is a moving target.
An obscure instrument maker might be irrelevant to most historians but fascinating to a musician trying to establish the provenance of an old mandolin. A forgotten boundary dispute might suddenly matter to someone investigating land ownership. A decades-old newspaper notice might contain the only surviving reference to a local event.
The value of information depends partly on who's looking for it.
And the questions that interest me are often the ones that don't fit neatly into established categories.
I've investigated musical instrument histories, historical land records, obscure biographical details, and problems involving people or places that have slipped out of the usual sources of information.
Some of these investigations have produced answers. Others remain unfinished.
I don't consider an unfinished investigation necessarily unsuccessful. Sometimes establishing what can and cannot be documented is itself useful.
We live in an extraordinary period for independent research.
A person sitting at home can examine historical maps, search digitized newspapers, consult library catalogs, compare property records, explore archival collections, and communicate with people around the world.
Artificial intelligence adds another set of possibilities. It can help organize complicated information, identify potential connections, translate unfamiliar material, and suggest research approaches that might not otherwise occur to us.
But it also introduces a peculiar problem: a machine can produce a very convincing answer to a question it hasn't actually solved.
A plausible explanation isn't evidence. A citation isn't useful unless it leads to a real source. And a confident statement doesn't become true simply because it was generated quickly.
I find AI most useful as a research assistant rather than an authority. It can help generate leads, but the leads still need to be checked.
In that sense, the fundamentals of research haven't changed very much.
You still need to know what you're looking at, where the information came from, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the evidence.
One of the pleasures of independent research is that you don't always have to justify why a question interests you.
You can spend an afternoon tracing the history of a musical instrument, examining a nineteenth-century map, or trying to identify a person mentioned in a forgotten newspaper article.
You might learn something completely unexpected.
You might discover that the original question was based on a misunderstanding.
Or you might find yourself investigating something entirely different by the time the afternoon is over.
That's not necessarily a distraction. Sometimes that's how discovery works.
I've always enjoyed the moment when a collection of disconnected facts begins to make sense. It's a little like working out a difficult musical passage: something that initially seems confusing gradually develops structure, and suddenly you can hear where it's going.
Not every mystery has a satisfying ending. Some records were destroyed. Some stories were never written down. Some questions may simply be impossible to answer.
But there are still plenty of unanswered questions worth pursuing.
That's part of the reason I maintain Adam Sweet Research.
I'm not trying to build a conventional research consultancy or establish myself as an expert in everything. I'm interested in the process of investigation itself, particularly when a problem calls for patience, creativity, and a willingness to explore unfamiliar territory.
I like old records, unusual stories, historical puzzles, obscure musical connections, and information that seems to have fallen between the cracks.
I like finding out how things came to be the way they are.
And I like the possibility that somewhere, in an archive, a forgotten website, an old photograph, or somebody's collection of papers, there's a small piece of information that could change our understanding of something.
It may not be particularly important to the rest of the world.
But somebody has to be curious.
And I've never had much trouble with that.
Adam Sweet Research — Independent investigations, historical research, and interesting questions.
I spend a lot of time in two worlds that might seem unrelated: music and plants.
One involves violins, mandolins, guitars, electronic sounds, melodies and rhythm. The other involves apples, raspberries, blueberries, vegetables, herbs, soil, rain, insects and the annual question of whether anything I planted is actually going to cooperate.
Lately I've been thinking that the separation between those worlds may be artificial.
Music begins with vibration. A violin string moves the bridge, the bridge moves the body of the instrument, the body moves the air, and eventually that moving air reaches an ear. Walk outside and essentially the same thing is happening everywhere, although most of it wasn't created for our benefit. Wind moves branches. Insects vibrate wings. Birds push air through their respiratory systems. Rain strikes leaves. Trees creak. Water moves through soil.
A garden is an extraordinarily complicated acoustic environment.
And apparently the plants aren't entirely silent either.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University reported in Cell in 2023 that tomato and tobacco plants subjected to dehydration or cutting produced airborne ultrasonic sounds. Healthy plants were much quieter. Even more remarkably, researchers could use machine learning to distinguish the condition of a plant from its sounds. The frequencies are mostly above human hearing, so this doesn't mean you can walk through the tomatoes and hear them complaining that you forgot to water them. But it does mean that a plant can produce information-bearing vibrations that travel through the air.
That's a wonderful fact for a musician who grows things.
It also makes me wonder how much of the world around us exists outside the little window our senses allow us to experience. The garden I hear isn't necessarily the garden a moth, bird or mouse hears. My version is only one mix of a much larger recording.
Birdsong presents an even more obvious bridge between nature and music.
Calling birdsong "music" can get scientifically slippery because we don't know that a bird experiences its song the way a human experiences Bach, bluegrass or a fiddle tune. But some of the similarities are remarkable. Songbirds learn vocalizations by listening to adults, retain auditory memories and go through an immature "subsong" stage that has been compared to human infant babbling. Researchers have found parallels between birds and humans in vocal learning at behavioral, neurological and even molecular levels.
Rhythm isn't exclusively ours either. One study comparing human musical performances with birdsong found categorical rhythmic patterns in thrush nightingales resembling patterns found in human music.
So when somebody sits on a porch and says that a bird sounds musical, that observation isn't as scientifically ridiculous as it might first appear.
The bird isn't playing our music.
Perhaps we're both exploiting some of the same possibilities contained in sound.
There is another connection that I've spent most of my life holding under my chin.
A violin is largely a botanical object.
The traditional instrument depends heavily upon spruce and maple, selected not merely because they're attractive but because of their physical and acoustic characteristics. Spruce used for soundboards has a particularly useful combination of relatively low density and stiffness, allowing vibrations to travel efficiently through it. Maple serves different structural and acoustic roles in the back, ribs and neck. Researchers continue studying how species, grain structure, aging and other properties of wood influence musical instruments.
Which means that before a violin was a violin, much of it was a tree.
Before somebody played a fiddle tune on it, there were years of sunlight, rain, cold winters, dry summers and growth rings. The environment became part of the material from which the instrument was eventually made.
I've played violin for most of my life, and I still find something satisfying about that. The musician isn't simply playing on nature. In a very literal sense, nature is participating in making the sound.
The bow complicates the story further. So do resins, varnishes and all the other natural materials humans have recruited over centuries to make instruments respond the way we want them to.
Musical technology didn't begin with synthesizers and computers. Humans have been engineering the natural world into sound-making machines for thousands of years.
But there is a less scientific connection between music and gardening that I think may be just as important.
Neither can be hurried very successfully.
You can practice faster. You can fertilize more. You can buy better equipment. You can analyze everything to death. But ultimately a phrase has to breathe and a plant has to grow at something resembling its own pace.
Both involve repetition without exact repetition.
A bluegrass tune may go around again, but the second time isn't precisely the first. The bow lands differently. Somebody accents another beat. A player hears something and answers it.
Gardening works that way too. Spring comes around again, but it isn't the same spring. One year the raspberries go crazy. Another year something eats them. One apple tree flourishes while the tree six feet away seems to spend the entire summer contemplating whether life is worth the effort.
You learn patterns, but you also learn not to trust patterns too much.
That may be one reason traditional music and agriculture have lived beside each other for so long. Agricultural communities produced work songs, harvest songs, planting songs, seasonal dances and music tied to particular times of year. Music helped organize labor, certainly, but it also helped people mark the recurring structure of life.
Before recorded music allowed us to hear virtually anything at any moment, music itself was often seasonal.
So was almost everything else.
Modern life has done something peculiar to listening. We've become very good at filling empty acoustic space.
Put in earbuds. Turn on the radio. Start a podcast. Stream a playlist.
I love recorded music and electronic music, so I'm hardly going to argue for turning all of it off. But there's something to be said for occasionally letting a place provide the soundtrack.
Henry David Thoreau paid extraordinary attention to sound. His journals repeatedly treat birds, bells, wind and human music as inhabitants of the same acoustic world. In 1852 he described distant piano strings drifting through gardens and elms until he felt himself "attuned to the universe."
That word attuned is exactly right.
A musician learns to listen for tiny things: intonation, attack, decay, resonance, silence, the space between notes.
Growing things teaches another version of the same skill. You notice the first buds. A change in leaf color. Whether the soil feels dry. Which insects suddenly appeared. Whether the birds are behaving differently. Whether October smells different from September.
Attention is the common skill.
Maybe that's the connection I've been looking for between music and botanicals.
It isn't that plants secretly play symphonies, or that every birdsong contains some hidden human melody. Nature doesn't need to imitate music in order to be musical.
Music and gardening both train us to notice change unfolding through time.
A note begins, changes and disappears.
A seed germinates, grows, fruits and dies back.
A tune returns.
Spring returns.
Neither returns exactly the same way twice.
And perhaps that's why, after spending so much of my life making music and now so much time growing things, they don't feel like two separate interests anymore.
They feel like two different ways of learning how to listen.
Nobody initially said who had provided the money.
Hampshire described the lender as a "philanthropic partner." The loan would allow the college to continue its summer and fall 2026 teach-out, wind down operations and give the trustees more time to deal with the college's land and other financial obligations.
That seemed worth following.
I had attended Hampshire years ago, so I already had a personal interest in what was happening to the college. But this became something different.
I wanted to know who had lent Hampshire the money.
The answer eventually appeared in documents filed with the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds.
The lender was Artocarpus Partners LLC.
The amount was $29.5 million.
Artocarpus was a newly created Massachusetts limited liability company with a Boston address. The mortgage covered Hampshire College property, and additional filings showed Artocarpus as a secured party.
That answered the first question.
It also created several new ones.
Who was behind Artocarpus?
Where had $29.5 million come from?
Why had someone been willing to lend that much money to a college that had already announced it was closing?
What exactly secured the loan?
And what would happen if Hampshire's eventual property sales didn't produce enough money to repay it?
Eventually Hampshire identified Jesse Johnson as the person behind Artocarpus Partners.
That should have made things simpler.
It didn't.
There wasn't a convenient biography explaining why Johnson had suddenly appeared in the final chapter of Hampshire College.
So I started looking.
One source led to another: corporate records, addresses, educational connections, business relationships, property
I had played mandolin for years, along with guitar and violin, and I wanted something that occupied a different space. I wanted the tuning and fingering relationship I already knew from the mandolin family, but with a deeper voice and enough range to function differently in an ensemble.
In other words, I wanted to go lower.
That started a search that lasted for years.
There were instruments that came close.
Mandolas existed, of course. So did mandocellos. Irish bouzoukis and citterns occupied some of the same territory, although builders and players weren't particularly consistent about what those names meant.
What interested me most was what we now commonly call an octave mandolin: an eight-string instrument tuned G-D-A-E, like a mandolin, but one octave lower.
Today it's easy to type "octave mandolin" into a search engine and find instruments, builders, recordings and discussions.
At the time, it wasn't nearly that simple.
So I kept looking.
One of the instruments I eventually encountered was a Weber Gallatin octave mandolin.
I had an opportunity to play a Gallatin at Woodkerne, and it gave me a much clearer sense of what I had been looking for.
It wasn't simply a large mandolin.
The lower register changed the role the instrument could play. It could carry melody, but it could also provide
The maples along Amherst Street have caught fire, the mornings come with frost on the fields, and the light goes gold by four in the afterno...
