Ever since I can remember, I was always interested in home recording. I remember my first cassette tape recorder that I bought for $29.95 back around 1973 and how much fun it was to take my little Fender guitar and put things down on those old "three for a dollar" blank tapes and explore the magic of recorded sound. In 2007 I decided to take the plunge and buy a digital recording outfit and set up an actual home studio, with the hopes of someday doing a whole album of songs and playing most of the instruments myself. With the exception of Riding On The Clinchfield and a few overdubs, all of these songs were recorded over a period of three years at my home on an eight channel digital Tascam DP-01FX/CD Portastudio. The microphones were two Audio Technicas- an AT-4047 and an AT-4033, plus an MXL-V57M. I used a Studio Projects VTB-1 tube blend mic preamp on some songs and also a Presonus Blue Tube pre amp on others. All the songs were built one track at a time, which of course is a long and slow process but it certainly gives an artist the chance to be both creative and objective. If a song lacked the right feel, it was scrapped and started over. The assembled tracks were then taken to Maggard Sound in Big Stone Gap, Virginia where under the guidance and expertise of Alan Maggard, we did some additional overdubs and the final mixdown. In regards to material, I decided to stretch out a bit on this album and do some things that you would not normally expect to hear from a traditional bluegrass guitar player who was born and raised in the the Clinch Mountains. My intentions are not to dazzle you with fancy hot licks, but just to play some good melody oriented songs. As I have said before, a good song is a good song, no matter the source and I hope that you will enjoy the final result as much as I did in doing the recording. James Alan Shelton