The store

The Ottawa Folklore Centre sells and stands behind the following products. We can also order just about anything you need!

• Top quality used, rare, handmade and just-plain-interesting Instruments
• Acoustic, electric and nylon-string guitars
• Violins, mandolins, banjos, ùkuleles, harps, autoharps and mountain dulcimers
• Build-your-own instrument kits
• Strings, picks, straps, stands and other useful accessories
• Recording devices, tuners, pickups, cords and other relatively newfangled items
• Band instruments
• All sorts of percussion instruments, from bodhrans to bones
• OFC Publications (songbooks, tunebooks, children’s books and more, since 1996)
• CDs, books, DVDs and recordings by our talented staff

The school

The OFC Music School is a longstanding and very successful part of the business. 800-900 students a week go through our renowned system staffed by some of the best and most dedicated teachers anywhere. You can find out about lessons, teachers and course offerings in the school section of this site, or by writing Alan Marsden at [email protected]

The folks

Owner Arthur McGregor has been organizing folk music all his life… so far. His first folk foray was the Eve of Destruction Cafe at the school of the Canadian Airforce base in Baden Soellingen in 1967. He organized it and played as part of a folk band called ’1917′, a name that went over big in Cold War Europe! Later, he organized folk nights at his high school, ran The Pit Coffee House at Sarnia’s YMCA, and helped organize Sarnia’s first folk festival. Upon his move to Ottawa’s Carleton University, he quickly started Rooster’s Coffee House and ran it for three years. Organizing music lessons in Le Hibou opened the door to the Ottawa Folklore Centre in October 1976. Arthur plays a bunch of musical instruments (jack of all trades) and performs solo as well as with his wife’s children’s show, The Celtic Rathskallions. He plays a mean ragtime version of O Canada at every Ottawa Folk Festival. He’s a founding director of the Canadian Folk Music Awards. He writes with a fountain pen and is much too busy.

Photo, back: Dave Milliken, Adam McGregor, Kurt Walther, Vince Halfhide, Vic Chartrand, Dennis (co-op student). Middle: David Schryer, Alex Houghton, Gary Greenland, Paul Haining, Bob Turner, Sandra Harvey, Terry Penner, Elizabeth Scarlett, Bob Martin, Doug Gouthro. Front: Terry Calder, Arthur, Brian Dubbledam, Chris Saunders