Ryan Barrington Cox plays in Asheville's If You Wannas and has a great new self-titled solo album which showcases the acoustic side of his music. He has a few things to say about his home town job and music scene in the video of "Hard Times In Asheville" above, and adds to that with the sixth installment in our series of articles below. I hope you enjoy Ryan's music and his thoughts on technology as a double-edged sword for music, and may comment here or drop us an email to linguamusicashow@gmail.com if you would like to be featured in the series. Thanks for visiting Lingua Musica, where music is the universal language! - Joe Kendrick

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Lately I've been blown away by the vast amount of information on the web. There are hundreds of thousands of people making instructional YouTube videos on different playing styles and countless other tools you can use to immerse yourself in all the styles of music, past and present, from around the world. For example, I've been dabbling in rag-time guitar lately. I could spend an entire week (if I had the time) watching other guitarists' hands, reading up on the life of Blind Blake, checking out tab, etc. And all for free! It's nuts.

I remember ordering a CD from Australia in the '90s because another band covered one of their tunes. You had to send off your $$ - like 30 bucks - and wait 6-12 weeks just to find out if you liked the band or not. Or trying to find people in your community whose hands you could watch to steal their licks. It's amazing how quickly that's all changed.

I don't think web communities are a substitute for real physical communities or scenes, but there's certainly a lot out there to absorb. It kind of makes me jealous of kids learning to play today.

On the flip-side, there's something to be said for going deeply into a small amount of information (vs skimming a million articles). When I did finally get that CD from Australia, I would listen to it over and over again, even if it didn't grab me on the first listen. Nowadays, I might skip out on a YouTube video halfway through just because there are a million other things to see. There are always trade-offs, I suppose. - Ryan

Artist stereotypes do not apply

How many times have parents cringed when their children fell in love with a musician? Let's be honest, the world has looked askance at artists of all stripes (with notable exceptions) for most of our history. Musicians tend to be thought of as people who may be great at their art but who are nonetheless pretty bad at life skills like paying bills, getting to work on time, and sticking with the missus.

Aaron turns all those stereotypes on their head; he is not only a fantastic songwriter and musician, but he also runs his own construction business and is a devoted family man living a stone's throw from where he grew up in the western NC mountains. He is as meticulous and intense about his guitar and ballads as he is about his green built homes and raising his two girls.

As you'll see in our pilot episode, Aaron does both life and art exceptionally well. The folks around him are a big part of that.