PSsT ....: This idea deserves to live.....

Yes indeed it's true. We are holding open mic's every third Wednesday of the month here at the Broadway location of Portland Music.

At the beginning of February we created a new window display depicting an Open Mic Stage.
We'd been trying to figure out what to do that would be new and inspiring to musicians.

The window that started it all.

Now, understand, that we do a new window display 8-10 times a year. No one has ever asked us if we are going to celebrate Mardi Gras in the store or if we are having a Christmas party......but whoa Nelly.....did we ever get asked if we were having an Open Mic Night! Each and every day we had inquiries. After about a week or so, Steve (Miss ya, big guy! Hope the road is treating you well!) and Carrie (our manager extraordinaire) took a look at each other and said...."I think we need to have an open mic night!". Steve started taking names and email addresses of people interested and Carrie started trying to formulate how we were going to do this.

Faster than a folkie on fire, we had our first sponsor.....Eastman Guitars and Mandolins. As soon as they heard the details, they were in and we were on our way.

Our Eastman rep, Steve Bernstein.

Eastman has been very generous and went as far as to offer us our Grand Prize to be raffled off at the end of our series: An Eastman AC-220! That's right, you could win a guitar!

Winner of an Eastman AC120, generously donated by Eastman Guitars and Mandolins

for our very first Open Mic Night.

Right on. Fast forward a few weeks to when D'Addario strings heard about what we were doing and they too jumped in to offer some support for this rolling acoustic guitar/songwriter party we were on. Even local luthier, Todd Mylet of Portland Fretworks, has also generously donated to our nights.

Thanks to you, our customers, who asked about it and are now enthusiastically participating. We are having a blast with this! We have held two events so far and momentum is building! We upped the ante as well. We got Eric, our trusty webmaster, on board to film the performances. With the performers permission, we post these to our Portland Music YouTube channel. The performers can forward them on from there to their friends and family....How cool is that? Now Jed's a millionaire!

The first two events were certainly a lot of fun and it was great meeting the performers, their friends and getting to see some great networking going on between musicians who were previously strangers.

Our next two will be held on June 19th and July 17th. After that, well, we think this idea deserves to live on, so stay tuned! We hope to see everyone from the previous shindigs and some new faces as well. Remember, if you just show up, you are eligible for prizes and the GRAND PRIZE!!

Alright, enough for now. See you the 19th! 7:00 P.M. sharp.

In the meantime, enjoy some photos from our previous two events.