2019 was very, very busy year at ArtistWorks! We saw many of our masters in the studio to film new lessons, but some our favorite musical moments happened at the multiple "Big Giveaway" contests we had this year, starting with Andy Hall and Bryan Sutton. In July we hosted Tony Trischka, Mike Marshall, and Michael Daves in our Napa studio for a live Bluegrass Masterclass event with a live and virtual audience, the first of it's kind here at ArtistWorks.

We had bluegrass pickers and singers from all over the US come to both learn and play. The 3 contest winners were taught one-on-one by the artists and the other guests who attended had studio seats to watch the instruction up close. Each artist also worked with a small group of students intimately when not doing the one-on-one teaching on camera, so everyone got a chance for some face time and instruction directly from their teacher.

Even after the event was over the jam circles continued for several hours in and around the office, guests and artists traded stories and licks, and it was a great time for all.

In an effort to include as many people as possible in the masterclass, we streamed the entire day as a live webinar that anyone could sign up for. This proved to be the most challenging and complicated shoot we've ever done. It turns out that screening and broadcasting live questions from across the US while live editing multiple camera angles takes quite an effort!

(pictured above: a portion of some of the routing necessary to make our online masterclass possible!)

Overall the entire live event went off with only a few hitches, despite all of the moving parts and this being our first time attempting such a broadcast. We have posted all of the Big Bluegrass Masterclass event footage to all of the Bluegrass schools for those of you who missed it, or want to revist what was taught. Due to this being a re-broadcast version of the original stream, there are some minor graphical glitches that you may see, but we thought you'd appreciate seeing the footage all the same, please excuse the imperfections and enjoy the content. The teaching in this 20-part masterclass series is top notch, ranging in topics from picking techniques to warmup exercises to genre-bending classic tunes! The parts are labeled and the entire series has been released in +Music > Big Bluegrass Masterclass. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!