# Acoustic jams or song circles in Lower Mainland, BC?



## Gnobuddy (May 17, 2014)

Edit: I wrote the following post (my first one here on Guitars Canada) more than a month ago, and it got no replies. But I'm happy to say the story has a happy ending: I happened to make friends with a neighbour who turned out to be an amateur musician, and through him found an acoustic jam group that meets once a week.

Just a few weeks after I started attending these jams, we were offered our first "gig": providing the music for a local charitable organisation one night a week while they serve up a free dinner for low-income people. 

The person behind that charitiable organization is also the owner of the building where the weekly jams are held, and he's been kind enough to allow the jam group to use his facilities for some time now (since long before I arrived on the scene), so we're happy to help.

My original post follows.



Hi all. I'm looking for any low-pressure acoustic jams or song circle type events in the general vicinity of Langley, BC. Anyone know of anything like that?

If anyone wants more details, I'm a new immigrant to Canada, and also new to this forum. I was a self-taught closet guitar player for a long time, but eventually plateaued in my guitar-playing abilities, burned out, and mostly stopped playing. Fast-forward a decade or so, and the urge to make music came back; I finally pushed myself to find the courage to leave the house and start singing and playing with other musicians.

At the time I used to live in the Los Angeles area, and via Meetup.com I found a few local Meetup groups that held either acoustic jams or song circles. After a couple years of weekly jams and song circles I decided it was time to dive in deeper, so I found a guitar teacher and started working on filling in some of the holes in my knowledge and technique that self-taught musicians usually have. I took lessons for a couple of years, right up until December 2013, when the time pressures of the upcoming move to Canada forced me to stop messing around with music and concentrate on getting ready to leave. However I stopped attending jams in the summer of 2013, because of a combination of time pressure and having to deal with some difficult family problems that took all my spare time and energy to deal with.

Which brings us more or less to the present. Here I am, starting over in British Columbia. It's now been a year since I've played with a group of musicians, and the old nervousness and lack of self-confidence is rearing its head again. The only cure is to make myself go out and do it, preferably in a relatively low-stress situation: it's a lot easier to make myself go to a song-circle in someone's back yard and play along to support the other singers and musicians than to get up on stage at an open-mic night!

What I enjoy most is improvising leads and fills and generally supporting singers and rhythm players. I also sing when I have the courage, including a few original songs I've written. I play electric guitar too, but I never found a venue for doing that which didn't suffer from (a) too many wanna-be guitar gods who wanted to compete rather than co-operate, and (b) ear-bleeding volume. 

So for the most part I played acoustic guitar, though in a few cases I played electric guitar at acoustic jams - with permission, and making sure I wasn't any louder than the acoustic players around me.

So: anyone got any suggestions for me? I've searched for local Meetup groups without finding much along these lines. But surely there must be other middle-aged musicians like me, who enjoy playing with other musicians, but don't necessarily have the time or inclination to join a band?

Thanks in advance!

-Gnobuddy


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