Had a blast last night at Scott and Jen’s second house concert presenting Stephen Bennett.

Stephen stopped here first before a week of California concerts with Andy McKee and Antoine Dufour (we’ll be going to Santa Barbara to see that this Friday).

A main reason for Stephen’s visit was to try out the latest (#2 and 3) US-made Holloway prototypes.  These are “style 4” versions, each with a different type of mahogany (right two), with the first “style 7” experiment on the left.  They were strung up and set up just in the last couple days.

One was quite a success, and Stephen played it for the night, and will continue with it on the tour, then return home with it.

The highlight of the evening for me was hearing Stephen debut (privately or in the show) about half of the new tunes from his upcoming CD of covers, most of which are fantastic, obscure tunes, and of course, firsts for fingerstyle harp guitar.  Along with the new CD of original tunes coming out soon, this will be another state-of-the-art winner, I assure you (with a title inadvertently provided by me I think).  I imagine Scott will get a video or 2 up (he was apparently streaming the whole evening live – did anyone see it?)

Stephen first played a few 6-string tunes on his Collings and his gorgeous 2009 Tony Karol baritone (shown).  As you know, we added this highly-regarded Canadian builder to the Harp Guitar Luthier page last year, and I recently moved him up to the main section, as he is now in the midst of harp guitar orders #3 & 4.  Pretty exciting times, these are, as this also means an equal amount of new players!

Speaking of new players, we were treated to the harp guitar debut of Korel Tunador, recent tour guitarist with the Goo-Goo Dolls and Katy Perry.  Performing one of his own tunes, he accompanied himself on the first (and so far only) left-handed Holloway that Scott had the factory do specifically for Korel during the first prototype run a ways back.

He plans to stick with it, and I told him to get it into a Katy Perry video, dang it!

Exciting times, indeed.