Guitar Workshops with Dik Banovich

Workshops and one to one tuition are available all year round at Crampoisic in Central Brittany. During the workshops we’ll look at various ways of playing traditional Irish and Scots music on guitar. We’ll have a look at some jigs, reels & hornpipes, some Breton tunes and explore different ways to accompany as well as playing the melodies.

Since 2002 he has been holding workshops at his home at Crampoisic in central Brittany.

Dik Banovich is well known on both the folk and blues scenes in Scotland. He has performed at festivals, arts centres and clubs all over Europe in various bands and duos as well as performing solo. He has done many workshops in traditional guitar, with the Feis movement in Scotland, in art centres and at music festivals throughout Scotland and the South West of England.

 

 

A Little Background Information!

It was about 1971 when Dik first realized that he was on the road to poverty with this guitar playing thing and thought that there must be a way of turning things around. So a postcard in the local shop window advertising " Guitar Lessons " brought a handful of hopeful students and started a secondary career in teaching, which somehow managed to bring more poverty, and even despair.... "First finger, not the first fret!" was frequently heard being shouted from the flat in Aberdeen where he taught. More forays into teaching, and a two year non - formal education course in community work brought a definite shift away from one to one teaching and more interest and involvement in community work and young unemployed group work with guitar.

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For seven years Dik was guitar tutor in the Feis Movement in Western Scotland. The Feis organises a residential five day course, usually during the Easter Holidays in the West, for 8 to 14 year olds in various traditional musical instruments.One of it's main thrusts being the resurgence of the Gaelic culture and language. Every year this culminates in a concert by the pupils in front of their parents, tutors, teachers and peers on the friday evening to showcase the musical talents gained during the week.

For over twenty years Dik was immersed in the musical traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and the Appalacian Mountains. For a long time in the North East of Scotland, the only way to play with other people in the acoustic music scene was to play traditional music at sessions, the best by far being the wednesday night session at The Prince of Wales in Aberdeen. The regulars at this session were considered nationally to be some of the best instrumentalists in their field, the late Ray Stewart (appalachian banjo), Kenny Hadden ( irish flute), Ian McIver (melodic claw-hammer banjo) not to mention all the musicians who stayed over in Aberdeen waiting for the ferry to take them across to Shetland for the festival, not to mention the Shetlanders themselves, brilliant musicians to a man, who would be in Aberdeen for business and pleasure, or stranded overnight due to a storm. "Everyone was so encouraging, always wanting to show you something, always wanting you to show them something" he says.

"You just have to be open to all influences" he says. "There's so much music out there I couldn't just say I play blues and that's that. I would have got much better at playing the blues if I had tunnel vision about it, but then I would have missed out on so much more. I believe that you should always strive to sound like yourself, not like somebody else, and the only way to do that is to try and reach that creative bit that we all have inside us and access the musical influences that make up you".

"At the workshops I try to encourage people to work together, to share the influences they have with the rest of the group. It's not just about technical ability (although technique is very important), but how you can improve on what you already have and hopefully being encouraged to take on the task of searching for musical influences that will inspire you."
"I particularly like doing guitar workshops in cooperation with other acoustic instruments like the fiddle or bodhran. That way each individual workshop can have a common theme, like a tune or a rhythm, and we can all meet up at the end of the session to play together. I find that this also helps promote the understanding of the different instruments and encourages people to explore each others' repertoires".

Dik moved to Mid Devon from Scotland in 1997 and continued to lead many workshops at art centres and festivals throughout the South West.

He now holds workshops at his home at Crampoisic in central Brittany.