Yesterday Andrés got up and went to class while I worked on processing the pictures from the roadtrip on Sunday. At 3pm he had a one-hour break between classes, so I headed out to meet him at a park on campus. We had some coffee and I went with him to his Scottish Ethnology lecture, where they had a guest speaker giving a demonstration of Appalachian folk songs, showing how they had evolved from European folk songs as they were carried across the sea by immigrants. She accompanied her songs with a dulcimer, which sounded incredible. The sound was reminiscent of one I've enjoyed in some of Joe Satriani's songs, and I always wondered how he got his guitar to sound so soft and melodic. I know he experiments with different instruments, and has a banjo/guitar hybrid, so it wouldn't surprise me if he used a dulcimer or similar instrument on those songs.

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