February was a wild ride. I had several performances with my dear friend Don Richmond both as a sideman in his Lazarus CD Release band and as a duo which we call The Two Dons. I've also been up in Don's studio in Alamosa, Co laying down electric guitar tracks for our friend Alison Kitchen's new CD "Edge of Everything". That's going to be a sweet album when it's done. My trio in Taos has been taking a break and we'll fire that machine up again late February/early March. The main thrust for me the past month has been to get my home project studio functional. It's a portable studio in a laptop. The software is incredibly deep and complex and I really should take a course to learn how to use it, but I'm diving in on my own with it like just about everything else I do. Doing this on a Windows based laptop is not the smoothest endeavor. There are a lot of bugs that have to be hunted down and dealt with and it takes a long time and a lot of tweaking before you ever get near the record button.  I have a couple books and some tutorial DVDs to help me out. I'm over a hundred hours into the learning curve so far and strapped in tight. I suspect it'll take a couple hundred more before I have a real handle on the beast, but when I do I'll be able to engineer most of my own recordings, help other people with theirs (including sending music files back and forth over the internet), compose music for films, crank out demos and just get as experimental as I like... and I do like to experiment. I've been a studio rat since the late 70's and this is pretty exciting for me because of the freedom and easy access... especially the orchestral end of the composing that comes with having a sample library. Right now I'm in a cello and drum mode. I've owned the gear for quite a while but various things have kept me from tackling it… it's not something you can whittle away at. When I get this update done I'm off to play with my pal Ellis Paul and Radoslav Lorkovic on the Cayamo Cruise which sails out of Miami. We're heading to the Virgin Islands with Indigo girls, Shawn Mullins, John Prine, Richard Thompson, Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and an unbelievably long list of other amazing artists. This'll be payback for not having heat or hot water this past week in New Mexico. Thanks again for every little thing. All the best to you. DonCon