“I came from classical guitar,” says Resa. “The first few times I put that pick in my hand, I dropped it. It was so hard to do! It sounds silly, but don’t give up. Go to a festival, immerse yourself in the music. You can’t play bluegrass music if you don’t have it in your ear.”

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But even with its long history, the PMO is by no means an ensemble guided solely by tradition. Under the direction of guitarist and mandolinist Mark Davis, a member since the 1970s and director since 1989, their repertoire covers all sorts of genres, from Renaissance classics to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” And there is no shortage of new music. Bob Margo, one of the PMO members, often arranges or commissions new pieces for the group.

Mandolins come in all shapes and sizes, analogous to instruments in a string orchestra. Mandolins, mandolas, and mandocellos make up the bulk of the ensemble. Within each section, the instruments vary in age and style. Mark explains the difference between the modern American and the older European designs: “The European instruments have a big round, lute-like back. But [Orville] Gibson designed an instrument with a carved top and a carved back, like a violin.” Gibson’s American mandolins borrow the violin’s F-hole design, while the European styles use a single oval hole, a design that originated from lutes.

In this composition by Owen Hartford, violinist Rachel Panitch performs a solo with the Providence Mandolin Orchestra in the Netherlands.

However they ended up here on this Tuesday night, mandolin in hand, exchanging smiles over their music stands, the musicians of the PMO couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Many have been with the ensemble for 30 years or more. “When you come into this group, it’s almost like you’re coming into a family,” says Mark. “It’s a real community.”

How long have you been working on this album?

The idea to pursue recording records as a thing to do got in my head when I was a senior in college. The first record I ever made was when I was a freshman in college, actually. So, I’ve been [recording] for a while, but this particular one started summer 2016.

As a self-recordist, what was the process like?

When I first started recording with the intention of making a record, I was basically in a little attic room in Providence, recording into a cell phone. I had no contacts, no studio, no equipment, very few resources to devote to it. All the equipment that I purchased to make the record I ended up selling to pay for mixing and mastering. So, I had no resources and no expectations except that I wanted to make a record.

Where did you record the album?

The piano, vocals, and some of the guitar were recorded in a studio. I ended up meeting an engineer, Seth Manchester, who works at “Machines with Magnets,” a recording studio, art gallery, and music venue in Pawtucket. Strings were recorded in a Bushwick basement in Brooklyn, NY. But the horns, woodwinds, bass, and maybe half of the guitars were recorded in my home studio.

How did you keep a consistent sound quality when recording in so many different places with different acoustics?

Part of the challenge was going into it knowing that it would end up being a collage-y thing. Everything was recorded individually and then overdubbed and mixed together. Were I advising somebody to do something like this, I would recommend that they use their ears to make sure that what they’re recording doesn’t assume the quality of the room. I think it’s important to treat your room with bass traps or Persian rugs or whatever in order to have the rooms acoustically similar.

What guitars do you play on this album?

I used 3 guitars primarily. One was a 1962 Gibson LG1, a student model from the 1960s, famously played by early Rockabilly musicians. And then I used a hollow-body electric guitar, an Epiphone Elitist Casino. And then a 1965 Guild Mark 2, a nylon string classical guitar, which is one I’ve had forever. That’s the guitar on which I wrote most of the songs.

Anything else that you want to add?

I think that people who are self-recordists have a tendency to focus too much on the gear they’re purchasing and the brand names. If you read magazines, they’ll tell you what mics to buy, what equipment you need, stuff like that. But it’s really not about what you can afford. It’s much more about your desire to do it and your ideas and your musicality. That’s much more important.

Julian’s project (and PhD dissertation) No No Boy shares stories of Asian-American history through music. With harmony singer Erin Aoyama, Julian has been touring around the country, performing in churches, schools, and community centers. What is now a songbook, a full tour schedule, and a series of educational sessions originally started out as a collection of research projects and a personal exploration of his family’s history:

“About a year ago, sometime right after the election, I was at home in Nashville with my mom, and I just started listening to these interviews that I had transcribed of people that were in these [Japanese internment] camps and other interviews with Asian-American musicians. I remember being at the dining room table, and my guitar was right there, and I just started writing all these songs. Literally while I was transcribing these interviews. Telling these stories through these songs.”

When Julian picks up a guitar, you can’t help but lean in and listen. Whether playing a song at the kitchen table or onstage, Julian’s a natural performer. Both he and Erin effuse a genuine charisma and sincerity that brings an optimism to the songs despite the bone-chilling intensity behind the stories. That Erin’s grandmother was incarcerated during WWII makes the music all the more personal. For Julian, “it’s really powerful for her to sing these songs with me.”

No No Boy also brings Julian into collaboration with other Asian-American musicians. He and indie-rock violinist Kishi Bashi are playing a sold-out show in Providence, RI later next week, and earlier in the year, cellist Takénobu joined them for a southern tour through Alabama and Tennessee. The project is a commemoration and celebration of Asian-American history that Julian invites everyone to join; his goal is to “spark conversations with people, regardless of their background.”

This year, Julian and Erin are hitting the road with No No Boy. Julian has presented his research at academic conferences and has spent countless hours studying ethnographic theory, but where the project really finds meaning, he says, is in concert:

“It’s a really unobtrusive way for people to connect to this history because you’re telling stories through songs about individuals. It’s not hitting people over the head with, ‘Did you know 120,000 people were incarcerated in these camps?’ You talk about actual names of people and what they were doing in these spaces, and how they lived.”

It’s definitely a great way to get a PhD, but the project reaches far beyond Julian’s graduate studies. At the end of the day, No No Boy is really about the connections between Julian, his guitar, and the audience: “The world makes a lot more sense when you’re hanging out and singing songs and having conversations.”

In jazz, room response contributes to the style’s aesthetics. Unlike classical recordings, which are often generous with reverb, jazz acoustics tend toward sounds that are clean, crisp, and clear. Many engineers achieve this by recording instruments in isolation, but putting the musicians in totally separate rooms risks minimizing eye-contact between players. “To me it’s never as good if the musicians can’t see each other, because jazz is very interactive. I always try to set up so that they’re isolated but can see each other.”

When you throw an audience into the mix, you enter a whole other world of recording: live shows. The audience, by making noise and even changing the room acoustics with its physical presence, is a key element that distinguishes live concerts from studio recordings. “If you heard just a guitar cab from a live concert, it doesn’t sound very good. The amplification of the room gives some life back to the sound. You can also put a couple mics out in the audience to capture what’s going on in the room.”

You have to experiment, Monte encourages. Try the drums in this corner, the guitar in this spot. Move the mics around. Record a sample, listen back. Then move around again, until you’ve found the spot where the room sounds the best. Remember, you’re not just playing in the room, you’re playing with it.

Mark Benis, a video game and film score composer, studied music in college and is now in graduate school for composition at NYU. He uses theory to maintain a creative flexibility in his character themes: “Say you’re writing for TV and don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen later in the series. You write a theme for a character, say they’re a very headstrong, aggressive person. If your main motive is big Taiko drums and guttural men’s choir, but they have a very tender scene later in the series, you’ve kind of written yourself into a hole. If you write a motive that can imply all sorts of harmony, you have more possibilities.”

Theory also helps him translate a director’s instructions into musical notes: “If we’re talking about a client-composer situation, it’s the composer’s job to interpret what your client says into musical language. When they say, ‘I want this to be darker,’ does that mean they want the same melody but just want you to orchestrate it for cellos and double basses? It’s interpreting their words into theory and seeing if you can accomplish the changes they want.”

I next talked to Cory Broad, who plays acoustic guitar with the band called ., or One Dot. Cory’s been playing and writing pop and rock songs for 15 years, and this September at Brown University, he decided to take a class in music theory.

When Cory composes with his band members, theory is never a big part of the composition process. It’s more about the vibe of the music, and less about harmonic complexity: “I’ll write songs [with chords] I-IV-V, playing everything on the guitar with parallel fifths and octaves, and I’m pretty chill with that. It’s not very theoretically complicated or particularly harmonically interesting. I’m more concerned about the words and the emotions and the performance.”

Cory sees theory as a tool to use when he needs it, and ignore when he doesn’t: “Whenever I pick up more theory I get concerned that I’m going to lose some kind of naiveté or something that I wanted to maintain in writing or doing music. But I don’t think that fear has been true. Having the theory is helpful sometimes, and then it’s pretty easy to just ignore when I don’t want to use it. If I need to think through something, then I’ll try to turn on some of the random theory stuff I have floating around.”

Whether you’re writing scores for films or playing and recording for yourself, music theory can be a great tool for tackling technical problems. But if you want to just zone out and groove, diving headfirst into a deep analysis might not be necessary. How do you use music theory, if at all, in your music?

So, you’re a musician and a filmmaker and a magician. Can you tell us a little bit about that, how you integrate these three aspects of your creative character?

I began as a musician. My parents got me started off with piano, and eventually when I got to high school I decided to focus on the violin. And in middle school, I picked up magic, and there’s a lot of similarities with magic and music. Magic involves a lot of finger dexterity, but it also is a performance art. You’re trying to convince your audience, or make them feel something using something that isn’t necessarily tangible.

Then in college, that’s when I started to get into filmmaking. I borrowed a mixer from an a capella group that I was a part of, and I was like, “Hey, I’ve seen all of these YouTube covers, I think we could do one, too.” And so in a day, we just recorded and filmed the video, put it out, and we got a huge positive reaction from our college community. And that was kind of the catalyst for it all.

I used to think that you needed really expensive cameras in order to shoot YouTube covers, but as I did more research, I realized that all you needed was a DSLR camera and a set of lenses, and you can get professional-looking videos. And so I created a YouTube channel and combined all my passions: magic, music, and videography. My handle on social media is “SleightlyMusical.” It’s a play on words – “sleight” is actually from “sleight of hand.” I try to combine slight of hand with violin playing, all the while shooting in really scenic type of areas and venues. And so I’m hoping to continue to do this in some greater capacity in the future.

What advice would you give to aspiring musicians?

To string players or classical musicians who are trying to “make it” in this current decade… I think social media that is relevant to your audience is more important now than it’s ever been. Classical music is very, very competitive, and there’s not a crazy amount of jobs. It’s important to diversify your skill set and not just try and get orchestra gigs. Think about doing recording sessions with an artist, doing sessions recording scores for video games or short films, and putting out your own content on the internet. You have YouTube, you have Facebook, you have Instagram, Soundcloud… you have all these different platforms that you can use to showcase your talents. If there isn’t that niche for you, you need to carve it out for yourself.