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.