Customer Rating: 
Summary: Natalie at Her Best!
Comment: One of my favorite MacMaster CDs! The cuts are lively, beautiful, and present Natalie at her best. If you're a MacMaster fan, this CD is a must for your collection.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Listening Pleasure
Comment: I got this CD for Christmas and haven't stopped listening to it. This is Natalie at her best! The track "My Love, Cape Breton and Me," which is the only vocal, just brought tears to my eyes. Everything this woman does is gorgeous, and her soul shines through!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Natalie who? Victor is the Macmaster
Comment: This is an amazing disc, with a good showing by all. I love Celtic music, I love new grass, any disc with Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck, Victor Wooten, and Jerry Douglas on it is worth buying, even if they were playing with Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson (Uhmm...like I thought a Dobro was like an extinct bird or something....). However, despite the I-just-escaped-from-a-Mary-Kay-convention look of the cover, Macmaster is amazing. The tone is sweet and the speed is amazing. As a side note, Victor Wooten steals the show, he emulates a bhouran (Irish Frame Drum) and also plays a duet with Natalie. Amazing. I would have to agree that the "master's hand" is at best dopey, and after wading through the grating lyrics I was disappointed not to hear some kind of killer violin solo. This is the exception though and is easily solved by hitting the skip track button. Awesome album...definitely worthwhile
Customer Rating:
Summary: From a Blueprint to a Masterpiece
Comment: Natalie MacMaster is a true musical treasure whose talent is extremely underexposed to our American culture, for her Celtic fiddle playing is extraordinary. I know, for I have witnessed it with both my ears and my eyes.Featuring this outstanding fiddle playing is Natalie's latest studio release,Blueprint. It is on the Rounder Records label, a name that might draw a response in the nature of "Where have I seen that name before?" For those of you who might be wondering, Rounder also features Joan Osborne since her departure from Mercury/Polygram, as well as the latest recordings of the lovely Alison Krauss, whom I often compare with Ms. MacMaster. In fact, many might regard Natalie MacMaster as being, in many ways, Canada's counterpart to Alison Krauss, or, in turn, Alison Krauss as being the American counterpart to Natalie MacMaster.
Enough, already!! They're both fabulous!!
As for the Blueprint CD, featured are the great musicians who have been tightly associated with Ms. Krauss and other leading names in traditional and contemporary bluegrass. Among them are Bela Fleck of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and Jerry Douglas, who is widely known as "the world's greatest dobro player".
In this package is versatility, a little something for people of all age groups to enjoy. The tunes range from the ancient Scottish tradition rhythms appreciated in Natalie's beloved Cape Breton to more contemporary tunes that are essentially categorized as Neobluegrass fused in with the lightning-fast Celtic fiddle playing that only Ms. MacMaster can patent.
As a whole, Blueprint is an excellent CD that will help many an avid listener from America or from another similar culture to acquire a new musical appreciation for, if not a whole new musical taste in, Bluegrass and/or Celtic music.
If the CD does not quite do it for you, then go see Natalie MacMaster live. I recently attended fer performance in Smithfield, NC. Her arrangements were some of the best I have ever seen in a live show. At the very least, she is truly amazing with her athleticism on stage and her ability to create energy in concert without missing a note.
Natalie MacMaster is a true all-around entertainer, and if you don't believe me, then I say, again,"Go see her perform!!!" You will be amazed. I promise.
Customer Rating:
Summary: she does it again
Comment: MacMaster has done it again. I own two of her other CD's A Compilation and In My Hands. What drawed me to this CD was that Touch of the Master's Hands was on it. I was first introduced to this song when my grandfather pasted away, and they sung it for him. I have yet to hear a better version of it than what MacMaster has done. Along with the other songs on the wonderful CD, it makes a wonderful, and enjoyable listen. One thing that I did notice was that it differed from her other CD's a little bit, but that's a good thing in some ways. Too say the least, a wonderful job done.
