Harmony Music House Produces “Note-able Improvement” at Adult Bluegrass Ensemble

by Jason Law

Harmony Music House is a music school in Boulder, Colorado, offering individual music lessons for just about every instrument, and group lessons in the form of a “Teen Rock” class and an “Adult Bluegrass Ensemble,” both of which take place a few times a year, with options for various skill sets and levels.

Jump to Notable Improvement Video   •   See All Spring Adult Bluegrass Ensemble Videos

On a recent Friday night in Longmont, Colorado, a very special concert took place at the Altona Grange.

Six bands gathered to play separate short sets to an enthusiastic crowd who were there to support the musicians and to be entertained.

This wasn’t your typical concert.

These weren’t “professional” musicians on stage. In fact, the majority of these musicians had never previously stepped foot on a stage to perform. Many had only recently picked up their instrument. These weren’t traditional “bands.” Many of the assembled pickers on stage had only just met their bandmates a few months earlier.

No, this wasn’t your usual concert. But it wasn’t a high-school music class recital, or a battle of the bands.

This was something different.

This was the culmination of eight weeks of dedication, practice, teamwork, enthusiasm, and heart.

This was the Harmony Music House Adult Bluegrass Ensemble.

On that particular Friday night in Longmont, this reporter was in attendance, not in the crowd, not to take photos or to get the scoop. No, this reporter was on the stage to perform.

Ok, let’s cut the journalistic “this reporter” crap. It was me, Jason, and this is personal, so I am going to tell you about it in my words, in the first person. Pulitzer nomination be damned.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid. I got my first guitar at around age 10 or 11. It was electric. And red. And it had to have a whammy bar. Because Eddie Van Halen had one.

I took lessons at the Newtown Music Shop in Newtown, PA (where everything is named such – Newtown Hardware, Newtown Record Store, Newtown Laundromat. It’s so you know where you are, I guess). My instructor, the owner of the shop, Bob, was a legend among anyone who grew up in that area in the 80s and 90s. Not for his skill, but for his teaching technique. Or lack of one.

A typical lesson with Bob went like this:

• Sit in the lesson room for several minutes until Bob shows up smoking a cigar. (It was the 80s!) Wait for Bob to transcribe a bunch of songs into a blank music book.
• Wait for him to say “play this 5 times” before leaving the room.
• Sit there and maybe attempt to play the song you never heard of (he gave a lot of Beatles tunes – to 10-year-olds), or maybe just sit there and contemplate your life choices.
• Wait for Bob to return, usually eating a hoagie.
• Have Bob grunt something, in approval or rejection, the grunts sounded the same.
• Wait for him to scribble more songs you never heard of in the book and leave the room again.
• Repeat process.

Needless to say, I didn’t get very far with guitar lessons.

But, eventually, my own curiosity and creative nature took hold, and I did learn a bit of guitar.

In college, I found some friends to “jam” with, and learned some chords. When I graduated, I moved to the beach and bought an acoustic guitar. I improved and became a fairly competent “party/campfire” player – I knew chords and could play them fairly well. I learned to play a ton of songs, of which I had printed the music from a recent invention called “the internet,” and I happily strummed my heart out at home, by myself.

I had reached a level where I thought I was decent and could hold my own.
Then I moved to Colorado.

The Colorado bluegrass scene is insane. It seems that every kid busking on the corner can pick at a level I had never seen before. I hadn’t heard bluegrass before coming to Boulder, but I quickly became hooked. (I have String Cheese Incident to thank for that. I like to say I came for the Womp and stayed for the Twang.  And then I discovered a group called Yonder Mountain String Band).

Eventually I (with my wife, Kelly) started Festy GoNuts, became entrenched in the local and national music scenes, especially bluegrass and jamgrass, and found myself surrounded by bluegrass and bluegrass musicians. Parties turned to picks, festivals turned to campfire jams, and I was completely lost in all of them.

I never stopped playing my guitar through all of this. I just never got better.

I tried some lessons – Artist Works is great, but wasn’t my style of learning. I’d go through stages where I tried to buckle down and practice, learn scales, pick up something new, but in my limited playing time, I inevitably would revert back to playing my same familiar tunes and same old chords. I wasn’t accountable to anyone but myself, and myself tended to be lazy about learning and practice.

Accountability is a big lesson here – so remember that.

So let’s fast forward to this year.

I turned 50 last year, leading to some introspection, and when 2026 came around, I made a pact with myself to try to get better at guitar.

I started going to some open bluegrass picks at local breweries. These are great ways to learn, and with the explosion of bluegrass pickers on the Front Range of Colorado, you can virtually find a pick every night of the week.

I realized that I wasn’t that bad. I had learned something in 40 years and could mostly hold my own as far as following the songs went, but I lacked the knowledge and the tools to really keep up. Occasionally, I was lost, and I certainly couldn’t take “breaks” (“solos” in bluegrass!).

As luck would have it, I was borrowing a guitar from a friend – trying it out to see if I wanted to buy it from him (I did). I had that guitar at a pick at Main Stage Brewing in Gunbarrel. The guitar case had a Harmony Music House sticker on it – of which I had paid no attention. But, someone at the pick that night noticed it, and struck up a conversation with me, and told me about the program.

I went home and looked it up. The spring class was beginning in just a few weeks. I contacted the school to see if I could enroll, and after a conversation with Robby, the instructor and founder of Harmony, I was squeezed into a class.

I was in – and my guitar playing was about to change forever.

As preparation for the class, each student was to provide a song, with the chord chart and lyrics. I picked “Late In The Evening” by Paul Simon. I’m well aware that it is not a bluegrass song, but we were told that it didn’t have to be a traditional bluegrass tune, and to me, it was an easy song that I knew well, with only 3 chords that pretty much repeat. Ha!

Our class was connected via email chain, and we all shared our songs. Upon sharing mine, I learned via Robby’s corrections that it was actually in the key of E. Fun.

So that brings us to my first Adult Bluegrass Ensemble class.

I arrived at the Harmony Music House and met my band:

There was Anna, who only recently picked up the banjo this year, but you would never know it. Anna brought “Half Moon Rising” by Yonder Mountain String Band. Also on the banjo (2 banjos??) was Erin, our skilled veteran, who had taken the class before and helped to guide us all through our nerves. Erin’s tune was “Leanin’ On A Travelin’ Song” by Billy Strings.

On mandolin, we had John, who already seemed to have good “chops” and a great singing voice. John came with “Sleepy-eyed John” – the Steep Canyon Rangers version. And Amelie – the classically-trained violinist trying out bluegrass fiddle for the first time, who could shred circles around all of us but had no idea that she could, bringing the Carter Family traditional “Keep On the Sunny Side.”

And of course, our fearless leader, Robby, our instructor on the upright bass. Robby provided a fiddle tune, which would become my arch nemesis, “Lonesome Fiddle Blues.”

We spent the first class going through a handful of the tunes. It was obvious to me that everyone else in the class had taken the time to listen to and learn a bit of everyone else’s song. I had not. I had not even printed up the music.

I had a brief moment of feeling lost and out of place. Was I out of my league? Was everyone else better than me? Those thoughts and feelings didn’t last long, though. It’s hard to explain how, but Robby does an amazing job of creating a safe, relaxed, and fun environment. We were all in this together. We all made mistakes. We all did something great! We supported one another from the very beginning.

I came home glowing.
And then I practiced.

And here’s that word I mentioned – accountability. I did not want to show up in the second week without knowing my new bandmates’ songs. So I listened to them and played them.

The second week, we got to “Late In The Evening,” and I sang and played. I’ve never been comfortable singing, but there was no fear in this environment. It seemed at once that my song wasn’t as simple as I thought. We struggled with the tempo, style, and changes more than I expected. After class, I went home, listened to the tune, and I realized what a ridiculous choice it was. It’s pretty much all bass, percussion, and horns. Not exactly prime for a Bluegrass Ensemble!

Each week, we would go through the songs, a few at a time, until we got better and better and could do all 6 tunes within the 90-minute practice session. And together, as a band, we worked out different choices on how to present each tune. We even found a way to grass up Paul Simon – but not too much! In fact, we complicated things a bit by alternating between bluegrass and funk styles within each verse – going bluegrass on the 4 and funky on the 1. (Don’t know what that means? Neither did I until I took the class!) And we were all assigned solos on different songs. There was no loosey-goosey jamming – we learned to perform each other’s tunes in a structured manner, like “real” musicians would.

And in between classes, we practiced. It was notable how each member of the band improved from week to week. We all wanted to perform our best on each other’s songs. Accountability!

As we neared the date of our performance, it started to become very real. We learned that we would be playing standing up – something many had never done – so we practiced that. We realized there would be microphones on the stage, and we would have to coordinate our movements around them. So we practiced that. And personally, I began to realize that I was going to be taking solos on 5 out of 6 songs in front of an audience, including the dreaded “Lonesome Fiddle Blues,” so I practiced the shit out of that.

At this point, I would like to acknowledge my amazing wife. Not only was she very supportive in convincing me to sign up for the class (nothing at all to do with us living and working together and her seeing an opportunity for 8 weeks of a night alone), but she supported me throughout the entire journey. She listened to all my stories about class every week when I came home excited. She made dinner so that I could go downstairs every night and practice. She reminded me to practice when I forgot. And, most patiently, she listened to me play “Lonesome Fiddle Blues” at least a thousand times.

At some point in the 3rd or 4th class, we all started to click a bit, and someone mentioned that we had shown notable improvement. A great name for a band, someone else in the room remarked. Weeks later, as the performance date loomed, Robby presented us with our setlist and his suggestion for a band name. To his credit, he came up with a great name for our band, one that reflected the songs we played, and would be an amazing name for any band. But it didn’t feel exactly like us.

So, on that Friday in Longmont, on the very real stage in front of the very real crowd assembled at the Altona Grange, Note-able Improvement took the stage.

Was it perfect? Of course not. I had a mini panic attack moments before we started, thinking that my capo wasn’t working right. It was. We played Lonesome Fiddle faster than we ever had, and I definitely missed a note or two. But all in all, we knew what we were doing.

We were prepared. We had practiced, and we knew the songs.

We were an actual band on that stage, performing an actual set of music in front of an actual audience.

So when our time came, and we kicked off the first tune in our set, we were ready.

“And we blew that room away!”

I can’t recommend the Harmony Music House enough.  In the course of my 8-week Adult Bluegrass Ensemble, I also took a few private lessons, something many of the other members of my and the other bands were doing.  This is certainly not required, but it was an added advantage to my playing.  

At my private lessons, as well as in my Ensemble, there was just an overwhelming sense of comfort and ease.  For anyone looking to take their playing to the next level, or wishing to try something new, at any age, I urge you to look up Harmony Music House.

https://www.harmonymusichouse.com/