Thoughts on Doubling Mando Tabs: I was excited and honored when Vicki asked me to address the Plank Road folks! My next thought was that this would be primarily a guitar playing demographic, and here I am a mandolin player. Not to worry, I'm a guitar "owner" too, and like most of us have been intrigued by all the various string instruments. So I'd like to share a few ideas about what you might be up against should you try the coolest instrument in any band, the mandolin. And I've got a couple nice tunes for you here in TAB that should help with flat picking in general, even on guitar. So here we go! A lot of my students play guitar and when they start with chord shapes on the mandolin, they'll say things like"oh, that one's like such and such on the guitar, except..." Hey, do yourself a favor--keep all your doubling instruments SEPERATE in your mind. The comparisons just add a mental step, ultimately slowing you down. Also the techniques shared by the instruments, like good picking, will take care of themselves. You won't lose what you've cultivated on one instrument. You might, however, expand upon it. Let's talk about good picking a bit. Most of us have to work a bit to get to playing steady, flowing eighth notes like you might hear on an old time fiddle tune. Think Doc Watson, or Sam Bush, or (yipes!) Chris Thile. How do they keep those notes coming throughout an entire tune? Set? Night?? It is an athletic activity, and we need to be careful not to hurt ourselves acquiring the skills. In fact lots of my students come with problems like "I can play, but after 45 minutes at the jam, I'm done!" Well, friends, it's all about relaxation. Your movement should be at the wrist in the picking hand, and that wrist and forearm should be relaxed. Doc and Sam, by the way, are exceptional, electing to use the elbow as the fulcrum. This yields a mighty sound, but it hurts! Try a closed pick grip--that keeps things relaxed in your pick hand, and don't squeeze the pick too hard. In fact, if you drop it now and then, that's good, it shows things are "loose" and ready to go. We all aspire to pick down-up-down-up. That keeps the accents in the right places. A down stroke is an accent and belongs on the strong notes in a bar, like the downbeat. Some of us, like yours truly, get a bit turned around sometimes, especially when in pursuit of a spontaneously improvised idea. But the great ones are always in control of those accents and that's why we can dance to or set our watches to what they play. Now, what to practice? Scales, arpeggios, licks? No, I always advocate tunes or melodies, because they inspire you to put more time in. I think that's why fiddle tunes play such a huge role in traditional and acoustic music. That's also why I've included Jethro's version of Cattle in the Corn here as an etude. You can play the melody or the harmony. You can play it with a friend or a recording device. This tune is known more frequently as "Cattle in the Cane" or "Cattle in the Canebreak" but ol' 'Fro called it Cattle in the Corn,( perhaps never getting away from those glory days as a Kellog's pitchman..?) It IS the same tune that Sam and Dawg and all them play on that great encyclopedia of bluegrass mandolin, "Bluegrass Extravaganza" on Acoustic Disc. Our own Robbie Fulks of Chicago picks the bejeebs out of this one too.. Who was Jethro, some of you are asking. Well, one way to answer that is to observe that in American mandolin style in the 20th century, everything stems from two major stylists: Bill Monroe and Jethro Burns. Bill is known for his band, The Bluegrass Boys, and as the architect of bluegrass music. Jethro worked in the famous and award winning country comedy duo Homer and Jethro, but also was an incredible all-purpose mandolinist who focused on jazz playing. He lived and worked here in the Chicago area for most of his life, even performing for Plank Road on at least one occasion. I was there. The main contrast in their styles was in how they voiced rhythm chords and how the eighth notes felt. Monroe used "chop" chords to emulate drum sounds. Burns rarely played rhythm, thinking of the mandolin as a melody instrument predominantly. But when he did, his chord voicings were colorful and jazzy, or in his words "like a good piana player.." All of this is an oversimplification of course, but hopefully will save you some time as you get farther into the mandolin world. When you hear latter-day mandolin titans such as David Grisman, Sam Bush, Chris Thile, Barry Mitterhoff, et al, you're actually hearing a combination of the Monroe and Burns styles, a sort of combined vocabulary if you will. The arrangement of I Can't Give You Anything But Love is Jethro's and gives you a sense of his "chord-melody"(melody stated in more than one note at a time) style, and also the sort of thing he taught his students (like yours truly) back in the days of Steve Goodman, The Earl of Old Town, Main Music in Skokie, and the like. $10 and perhaps a Coors Lite could get you a bunch of beautiful standards and the occasional fiddle tune, which he called "hoedowns"... As you amass chord vocabulary on the mandolin, bear in mind that the instrument is symmetrical due to being tuned in fifths. As you learn a chord shape, make a visualization of it, then notice you can move it anywhere on the neck--no capo needed. Between that and the fact that there are only four types of chords in all of music (major, minor, augmented, and diminished) you should be up and going on many of your favorite tunes without the aid of a massive chord book. And if any of this seems interesting or challenging, you can always drop me a line at my site. Happy Pickin' and Welcome to the Eight String World. Don't throw yer gee-tars away right away, but get ready for big fun on the coolest instrument in the world... Sincerely, Don Stiernberg
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