On and On

On and On - in the key of G.
This is an old favorite and very common in jams. Mike transcribed Bill Monroe's solo and it's really interesting. The intro and first few bars are fairly standard and typical of a Monroe break. Mike pointed out that as the progression moves from G to C, you almost don't think Bill's solo is going to work out. There won't be enough time to get through that descending G scale. But of course Bill knows what he's doing and he jumps straight from the descending G scale to a low C and makes it work.

A few bars later Bill does an interesting jump up to some double stops that descend from the D to the G followed by really cool rhythmic harmonics played on the D and G strings.

Anyway, here's Bill Monroe's version:



and here's me playing it as transcribed by Mike Compton.

First slow:




and then faster. This is still only about 70% of Bill's tempo. He makes it sound easy, but he's really cooking.

Travelin' Down This Lonesome Road

This next recording is Bill Monroe's break on the recording of Travelin' Down This Lonesome Road found on Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys - All The Classic Releases 1937-1949 (Disc 4).

Mike wants me to move to the key of F next. Playing out of this key requires mostly playing in second position with the root F found by your index finger on the third fret of the d-string. You can easily get lost if you don't learn your positions for playing out of F.

In this song, there's a pretty cool section where Bill plays a series of double stops, from second position using the pinky and ring, to first position with the index and ring sliding back up to second with the index and ring.

The song has a great, bluesy feel to it. It reminds me some of True Life Blues and Sugar Coated Love. Lot's of down strokes and slides. You can really here a bluesy precursor to rock and roll in this break.

Here's Bill's version.



And here's my attempt.

Back from Vacation and ready to pick some

Well when Mike got back from down under and I had my first lesson again, it was obvious I had not practiced the last couple of songs he gave me to work up. Of course, I have plenty of excuses - as my other posts show, I have been working on other stuff and learning to record, etc.

Mike: " sure, sure, I see how you are :)"

So I decided I better start working on some of Mike's material in earnest.

My first challenge is Monroe's Hornpipe. It's a straight forward fiddle tune in A that has a really driving dynamic to it. I still don't have it nearly up to Mr. Monroe's speed, but I hope I at least have the "feel" of it. It'll take a year (or a lifetime) to get it up to his speed.

I also am trying a new recording approach. I took my Michael Kelly to the beach (Vieques - an island off the coast of Puerto Rico) as my travel mandolin. I decided to remove the pickup so that it wouldn't get lost or corroded in the sea air. I haven't gotten it back together yet, so I decided to just record with iChat using the built-in iSight camera and built in microphone. The recorder is called the conference recorder from eCamm. I also use this to record my online lessons with Mike, which is great. I can review the lessons over and over.

For this recording, I used my Silver Angel F5 by Ken Ratcliff. This was the first really nice mandolin I bought - with proceeds from a poker tournament!

The mandolin sounds great, and has a really strong bluegrass chop. Don't let the poor recording equipment and my mediocre playing fool you. This mando is a hoss.

Break for vacation

Sorry the practice blog is getting a little stale. Not because I haven't been playing (I have!) but just not recording lately. I'll be recreating on a sunny beach on Vieques (little island off coast of Puerto Rico) for a couple of weeks. New posts to follow directly!
Don

The First Whippoorwill

The next one is from Mike Compton too. It's a Bill Monroe tune, The First Whippoorwill. I think it was originally done in G# but with the mandolin tuned to play in standard intervals.

I included two versions of this, one pretty slow and one a little faster.

The song has some very characteristic Monroe's moves. Like the slides from Bb to B and the pull offs from F to E. Lot's of good material to work into my vocabulary here.

Lessons with Mike Compton

Back in the Fall of 2007 I started taking online lessons from Mike Compton. Anyone who is on my practice blog probably knows Mike already - but just in case. Mike is one of the best Monroe style mandolin players in the world. He's also great at teaching this style of playing. So don't let my mediocrity fool you - Mike is the real deal and can really teach.

This first video is one of the first things I picked up from Mike. It's the solo to Blue Yodel #4. Bill Monroe plays this tune lightening fast. I offer it here at (much) more modest speeds. I included two version here, one slow and one medium. I don't attempt Mr. Monroe's speed.

The solo is played entirely with down strokes played near the bridge, except for the triplet phrases which are picked dud. So you get a bunch of those characteristic dud d phrases that Monroe loved so much.




This next one is Sugar Coated Love.

It's got some interesting timing in it and is also picked with down strokes except for the triplets and the tremolo.

When I first learned it, Mike told me I played it "real purdy," and that I had better stop doing that if I wanted it to sound right! He reminded me it was about love gone wrong and that Bill played it angrily with a very strong attack back at the bridge.

I've had about 6 weeks off from my lessons with Mike while he was traveling in Australia with Steve Gilchrist and Dasspunk. I suspect that would have been one helluva trip.

My lessons start back next week, so I'm working on that material again to knock the rust off before Tuesday.

Crosspicking Wildwood Flower

This week, our classes at the Folk School started back up. I'm taking 2 classes on Monday nights, Advanced Mandolin and Bluegrass Ensemble, both instructed by Dave Mueller. He's a great instructor and player. His regular bluegrass gig is The Grass Pack.

This week in the mando class, Dave introduced us to crosspicking. We used a version of Wildwood Flower from the Mandolin Cafe. As I understand it, crosspicking was developed by Jesse McReynolds to sound like the 3-finger banjo roll. I think it allows you to play something unaccompanied that sounds nice and full. In many cases, and in this song particularly, the melody is played on the lower notes, which ring out, while the additional two notes are put on top. The picking pattern generally is either d u u d u u d u (reverse roll) or d d u d d u d u (forward roll). There's also some interesting departures from these two used to create the correct rhythm of the melody.

Without further delay, here's my crosspicked version of Wildwood Flower.

Skip Gorman Weekend

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to spend most of the weekend listening to, learning from, pickin' with and hanging out with Skip Gorman. You won't meet a nicer fellow and a really great teacher. Skip was in town the entire weekend and my friend and a fellow Folk School board member Ellen was kind enough to host Skip at her house. Being a fiddle player herself, I'm sure she had a great time hanging out with Skip and taking him out to Geoff Seitz violin/fiddle shop.

On Friday night, Skip performed a concert at the Folk School of St. Louis. It was a great show, with Skip primarily playing guitar and singing the old songs of the West. He also treated us with a few fiddle tunes. I believe he only played one mandolin song (using my '21 Gibson F2!), but it was a treat.

After the concert, about 10 of us went back to our house and shared some snacks and nice red wine (thanks to my lovely wife - the Show Me Vegan). Skip was pretty tired, so he didn't pick any tunes after the show, but we enjoyed his stories and picked a few ourselves.

Saturday morning we headed down to KDHX 88.1 for Keith Dudding's Down Yonder radio show. Keith was a gracious host and had Skip for a nice interview and several songs. Skip even managed to get in a good plug for the Folk School!

Skip then had to rush off to grab lunch and get to his fiddle workshop, which I heard was a great success. Later that evening, Skip, Ellen, and a several other friends had a nice dinner and a little pickin' back at Ellen's house. I've never been to an old time jam where I knew NONE of the songs. Between Jim Nelson, Skip, Geoff, and Mark Renard, there was an encyclopedic knowledge of the old tunes.

As nice as all that was, finally Sunday came around and we had our mandolin workshop with Skip. As I already mentioned, he's a great instructor. He likes to weave stories into the class as he taught us 3 tunes and emphasized several aspects of Bill Monroe's playing that gave it its characteristic sound.

So I'm still working on getting the other songs from the workshop in shape for recording, but here's the first installment.

This is Waltz in G, which you can find on Skip's great CD The Old Style Mandolin Volume 2 Monroesque (or at Amazon). It's a very pretty waltz that Skip learned from Bill Monroe. I understand it was never recorded by Mr. Monroe (except for maybe on a bus recording).

Skip said as soon as he heard it he knew he was going to learn it. There's a spot where the rhythm goes to the A chord and the melody stays on a G. I really like it and I hope you will too.

Reading is a good thing.

So I've been spending some time working on my standard notation reading. This next recording is my latest practical project. I'm playing three parts of Vus Vet Zayn, a traditional Klezmer piece. There are 2 mandolin parts and one mandola part. I don't have a mandola yet, but I noticed none of the notes were below the mandolin open G so I just played it on the mandolin.

This song would really benefit from a smoother tremolo than I currently possess. I'll plan on posting again in a month and see if it's any better. Also, this song increases tempo after every 10 bars or so. Just thought I should let you know that I'm not rushing (at least trying not to :-).

Here it is:

Music Up!

The reason I'm really doing this blog is to give me an outlet to work on music and recording. I'm hoping that the added pressure of playing while recording will ultimately make me a stronger player.

(truth be told, I really wanted to buy some electronics for recording and this is my excuse)

I'm currently taking several classes. I'm taking an advanced mandolin class at the Folk School of St. Louis and also taking weekly 1/2 hour lessons from Mike Compton. This first song is a song I'm learning from Dave M. in the FS Adv. Mando class. I'll be posting some songs from my lessons with Mike soon too.

So without further adieu, here's my first effort.

The song is Twinkle. It's a swingin' song in the key of G major. The main difficulties in the melody of this song are up the neck sections and the rhythmic aspects. The rhythmic part is especially important to get as it's an approach that's often used in Bill Monroe style playing.

I used GarageBand on my iMac to record the music. I didn't use my better mandolins (Silver Angel F5, Pomeroy F4, Gibson F4), because I wanted to plug in and I only have a pickup on my Michael Kelly. Speaking of which, that MK is actually pretty decent once it got a professional setup. It was my first mandolin and as such will probably be a keeper.


The setup for this recording was:
MK with LR Baggs Radius pickup -> LR Baggs Para Acoustic DI -> M-Audio Firewire 410 Interface -> iMac with GarageBand -> iMovie HD

That last step is because I can't seem to figure out how to post plain music files to Blogger, but movies work just fine! ??

The upright bass is a very old King bass. I use a set of K&K pickups and preamp. More on that later. From the preamp I again go into the M-audio interface.

So here it is: Twinkle.

The Folk School of St. Louis

The Folk School of St. Louis is where I first started taking lessons several years ago. Since then, I've taken a number of mandolin classes, an upright bass class, and some old-time and bluegrass ensemble classes. The Folk School is a wonderful group of people that are very supportive.

About a year or so ago, I was asked to join the board of the school. It has been very rewarding working with the board.

In January, the Folk School moved into great new facilities. Many volunteers helped paint and finish the space. Yours truly caught here dripping paint onto the floor.

In addition to the great classes the school offers, we also offer workshops and performances.

Last year, we hosted Mike Compton and David Long for a great workshop (and house concert at my house). That was a real treat.

This coming weekend, another of my favorite mandolin pickers, Skip Gorman, is going to be in town for a concert and workshops. You can find details on Skip's site or at the Folk School.
Don

My inaugural post

Ok, so I've been playing mandolin for about 3 years 4 years now (it only sounds like 3 years) and it's time to start getting serious about getting better. I've always thought a little visibility goes along way toward motivating me to perform better. So, with that in mind I'm going to record, video, describe, commiserate, rant, and otherwise try to document my efforts to learn to play this 8-stringed beast.

If you don't enjoy the actual music, that's ok. As they say,

"it's actually a lot better than it sounds!"
Don

Maury River Blues

Here's the second installment. This song is also from the Advanced Mando class at the Folk School.

Maury River Blues is a great song in Am that uses a kind of slow even triplet style of tremolo. I'm working on trying to even it out and make the up and down strokes sound the same. You mostly play it out of second position. The other thing of note is the use of the DUD triplet followed by a series of down strokes. Very typical of Monroe's playing and important to get this technique down.

Here goes.