Vancouver Guitar Show

* Quite the show! *
The Vancouver Guitar Show, hosted in the Croatian Cultural Centre, was today. It was a blast!
For guitar geeks there were dozens of vendors of custom guitars and guitar paraphernalia. It was kind of amusing to see people having their picture taken in front of some of the fancy schmancy funky looking guitars. But that wasn’t the highlight of the show for me. It was the various performances on the two stages.
The highlight was an open mic that had a special surprise appearance by Don Alder. Quite the random surprise for what was billed as just a regular open mic. His acoustic guitar playing is a combination of fingerstyle, percussion, and classic guitar. Yes, it is a very unique style. To get a feel for it, here are three random youtubes of him showing different aspects of his style I just located:
and
and
He even broke out the very unique harp guitar for a few songs:
Fun stuff.
On another stage they had the Canadian finals of the Boss Loop competition. This had the three finalists from all of Canada do some live looping. A lot of fun to watch these creations take shape and evolve — really some interesting harmonies created by one person.
Great event — quite the show!