As you may now know, we are headed West on tour to Alberta and back in June to help promote our new album, On a Boat. Between a van (rental or purchase), gas, and food, it's going to be an expensive 2 weeks. That's why we're reaching out to our friends, families, and fans to help us make it happen! We've created a campaign on Indiegogo.com called "A Yellow Field Goes West!" Please watch the video on the side of the page and check out our campaign site here: http://www.indiegogo.com/AYF-Goes-West. If you can contribute to our goal that'd be swell, but if not please do share the video link (http://youtu.be/xCL0ni2ShU4) or the link to the campaign site to spread the word.

Thanks a bunch!

Neil, Joey, Sara, and Dave

Felicitations fellow fielders! I hope you're all feeling well and getting along well with your neighbors and whatnot. I just wanted to say we've been working hard on stuff! Stuff like booking shows all over the place. The Lackeys have been working hard on our future cross Canada tour!  We are heading out in the last couple of weeks in June and we're all really excited about it! There's more things coming soon so come back soon to see what's new! 

Those of you happy humans that know us A Yellow Field folks likely know by now that we like variety. Neil and I switch up our instruments more often than most, and Sara plays (aside from percussion of course) banjo, guitar, ukulele, piano and plenty of other things I'm sure! We mostly keep Joey on the bass, not because he can't play another instrument (he plays guitar, uke and piano too), but because the rest of us haven't gotten around to figuring out how to play the ol' stand-up bass. Yet. 

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today was why we do that. Personally, I started collecting instruments and learning how to play anything I could get my hands on as a real world experiment to try to prove the idea that you can do anything you want to, so long as you're willing to put in the requisite time and effort. So, I started picking up all kinds of new instruments.. I already had a guitar and a banjo, but I hadn't really started playing it consistently.. It was just some 5 string street cred that I hadn't fully taken advantage of yet. One day though, I wandered into a music store and picked up a uke at random and started figuring out how to play it while in the store.. I'm not very good at taking music lessons.. I took a few piano lessons a few years ago, and while my teacher was spectacular with the old ivory, I just didn't have the patience to sit down and learn a couple of songs that I wasn't all that excited about, mostly because I didn't know what songs to try to learn. But hey, I'm a writer!  I create and jam and improvise! All this somewhat structured learning just didn't do it for me. It felt like high school.. And I didn't like high school. So what then? 

Enter the internets. 

You can learn anything you want at any pace, in any order at any time at your own convenience and inspiration. When I get the urge to dig in and learn something new, usually I'll find a page that will give me a list of all the chords for a particular instrument and then start playing! Play through some chord progressions, make something that sounds nice.. maybe even solo a little bit. Even write a song if you're inspired! Then the big test comes - play with other people. Lucky for me, I have an accepting (and forgiving) band that puts up with me learning through new instruments. Over time just using it in different situations, on different songs, different keys.. Invent some chords, whatever.. Just have fun, and in the process you've learned how to play a new instrument in a fun and relatively pain free way. The best part is that you didn't end up needing to pay for lessons from anybody! Super! And you've managed to learn exactly what you need to know, no more no less.

There definitely is a caveat though, if you aren't comfortable making music in general, or this is your very first instrument, it might take a little longer, but again the internet is key. Go at your own pace, do as much as you want to at a time and have fun! Bring some friends, learn some songs.. The beauty is there's no pressure, you're not forking over loads of cash to a music teacher and feeling guilty that you're not practicing for 3 hours a day.  If you want to learn some tunes, you pretty well can get by with 3 chords! 

Using this fool proof, sorta lazy but oddly effective method I've learned to play (to various degrees of awesomeness) something like 15 instruments over the last couple of years. For no reason other than I can, and I want to. I think that has proven my theory pretty successfully. So what's next? See if applies to everyone! 

So here's my challenge: learn something new! Something you always wanted to know, for me it's musical instruments, but the theory should work for anything (one day when I have the time and motivation I'm totally teaching myself quantum physics ). Leave a comment if you have any thoughts, or have a different way of learning new things!

Hello again! It's the morning after our CD Release show at Grist Mill with Uncle Dan Henshall and the Nephews, and Banjo and the Bellows. We had an incredible time, the crowd was amazing! Apologies for the lack of facilities at the venue, but I hope everyone can understand why we would want to host a show at that incredible venue! We all headed over to the Huether afterwards to get some much needed beer and food, and sang Neil (I think you can call him Mr. Neil now, since he's 30. Ewwwwww!) Happy Birthday at midnight. It was a great time! 

Anyway, just a quick note to say good morning, thanks for coming out and we'll be seeing you soon!

Much love and folk,
A Yellow Field

 Hi! It's been a while since we brought down the site to be reconstructed. And it's been even longer since I wrote a blog post! Not to say we haven't been busy, just that we haven't been busy with the website! Just to get the timeline right here, I'm writing this on March 9th. The day BEFORE our CD release! Also the day BEFORE I actually finish putting this site together. A little misunderstanding brought me back a few steps and I'm sorta halfway through putting everything together. Again... But that's ok! I just hope nobody says "I told you so". Maybe you'll get that, maybe you won't. Anyway, back to the exciting part: The CD release! That's tomorrow. The recording's been done and mixed and mastered and everything, now it's burned and uploaded and ready for consumption! Well.. sort of. Still working on the digital part of that consumption. But hopefully later I'll have a second post saying "Hey it's done! Check this out!" Or something.

-Dave