Featured Article: Old School Guitar and Amp Shop Near Charlottesville, VA

Check out this article by David Maurer from the The Daily Progress.

http://www2.dailyprogress.com/lifestyles/2011/oct/09/shop-stays-tune-musicians-ar-1367038/

Although this shop is near Charlottesville, there is no scarcity of music stores in the metro DC area. Foxes Music is the go-to shop for sheet music in Virginia and Dale Music is the place music teachers recommend in Maryland. For wind instruments the metro area is lucky to have Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center, a destination store for the entire east coast (for price and variety). String players all seem to know about two old established places: In Virginia, for 45 years, Brobst Violin has been a family owned destination store for string players. In Maryland, The Potter Violin Company in Bethesda, claims to be “the largest purveyor of bowed stringed instruments in the mid-Atlantic region.”

In addition to theses old standbys, Metro DC has some interesting small specialty music stores: Guitar players hang out at Atomic Music , which buys and sells used musical instruments, mostly guitars, amps, and equipment. It has two locations–Beltsville and Rockville–but the Beltsville store is much larger.

Another well-known store in the area is The House of Musical Traditions in Tacoma Park, MD, which has “exotic, unusual, and vintage instruments” and is so cool it’s worth a trip to Tacoma Park.

While I have don’t have firsthand knowledge of the following, these shops currently are on my radar:
The Guitar Shop on Dupont Circle, a bass player, says it’s hit or miss for basses but “guitar players seem to love it.”
The guitar Gallery in DC.
Middle C Music, a traditional community store that offers lessons, instruments, sheet music, instrument repair, and touts itself as “the only full-service music store in DC.”