Picking 1

Having more time and inclination just at the moment, I'm blogging in more frequently about my progress. This is just for now as I need to spend time on the fretboard rather than the keyboard.

I've accumulated a whole shelf of Bluegrass and other mandolin books but have never really put them to proper use. I've preferred to jump into learning songs with a minimum of easy chords to support them. If I'd known at the beginning what I know now I could have accelerated this process, but although I've fumbled about, I'm convinced that the path I took was basically the right one for me. It had me performing songs and playing along with others in a social environment, and that gave me the incentive to keep going as well as providing real-life experience.

And I don't regret spending the time accumulating about 40 songs (rather than developing technique). If you expect to perform an average of three songs once a week, I feel you need that sort of repertoire to avoid too much repetition. Having said that, it's now time to slow down on mere accumulation for reasons of both maintenance and development.

Anyway, when it comes to picking, it looks like I'm going to have to give up my preference for instant gratification in favour of spending time in isolation working systematically through exercises. This is totally contrary to my basic personality and a huge and taxing hardship. Just saying.

I am starting with Bradley Laird's Mandolin Master Class from his Complete Learning System. I had seen Brad's videos on YouTube and was hugely impressed with their clarity. The book is strong on conveying concepts and reflects his pool of accumulated wisdom. My beginning point is playing scales with a metronome. I hate scales, I hate metronomes, and I'm easily bored, but I just have to bite the bullet. If I get too bored I will rehearse some songs in between. At this stage I'm playing scales very slowly indeed. The idea is to get the action and timing perfect so you can eventually play fast (but accurately). It rather reminds me of doing Tai Chi.

Lead Mandolin

Besides chop chords, the other major aspect of Bluegrass mandolin playing are the twiddly bits. While I need to improve my chopping, learning to play lead mandolin is now my major challenge,  and I'm aiming to make some discernible progress by next May.

The fundamental of playing lead mandolin is Alternate Picking as explained in this YouTube video by Don Julin:



There are two main aspects to this. The first is to hit the onbeat notes on a downstroke and the offbeat notes on an upstroke. So far so good. The second is to keep the right-hand moving in a regular rhythm regardless of what notes are played (or not played).

I've never really played melody on a stringed instrument before and at this early stage I'm finding it extremely difficult. However, I now have a week with more time than I usually have, so I'll see how far I get.

Further chopping progress

The last few months have been a period of unprecedented musical chaos and I am still struggling to get back to where I was before the changeover to chopping.

The biggest challenge has been playing the 7523 G3 shape without fouling neighbouring strings, but I finally made a bit of a breakthrough by improving my left-hand position. Thanks to Dennis Caplinger's Bluegrass Mandolin Basics & Beyond DVD I now have my left-hand square-on to the mando's neck with the thumb opposite the first finger and the back of the neck 'not' buried into the purlicue. This 'correct' position seems counter-intuitive for stretching but it works, and I can now use this shape in first position (i.e. as a G chord) as well as higher up the neck.

Apart from a small number of mainly modal/minor songs (which I'll probably keep in a style suitable for Old Time ), I've now sorted out what chord shapes to use, and it's basically a question of getting used to them, i.e. the new shapes, changing between them, making the necessary stretches, and, above all, making them cleanly without fouling.

I've also been experimenting with the even heavier tortoiseshell-style Golden Gate and Dawg picks. They give a nice 'chunky' effect and I shall be using these in the future.

The Bluegrass G chop chord

Torture machine for strengthening fingers

While developing the big stretch 7523 4-finger G chop chord I was hoping to get away with the three-finger X523 chord but it didn't work. As you chop downwards you can avoid hitting the open 1st string at the bottom but you really need to hit (and thus fret) the 4th string at the top. The same goes for all other three-finger chops, i. e. they need to consist of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings rather than the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings.

Somewhat late in the day I noticed the 452X G3 chop chord which is recommended for beginners, children and others with small hands, and that provides a quick fix to help smooth the transition. It's particularly good when playing in D as the changes between D, G and A are easy. And that also goes for the Key of E which I simply treat as the Key of D moved up two frets. Despite the reservations I expressed before, moving chords up the neck proved much easier than expected.

The 452X is less useful when playing in the Keys of G or C because the C chord shape is rather different. In G or C it's easier to play the 455X G chop chord as it has similarities with C and is identical to the 233X F chord shape. Although these chords cover three strings, they require only two fingers.

So, if I am using 452X in D (and the same shape moved up two frets for E) and 455X in G and C, when do I get to practice the 7523? I'm using that for songs in A which I treat as G moved up two frets. As the frets get smaller towards the bridge the stretch is easier. Once I've mastered this shape for A I'll attempt to move it down for G.

In the meantime I'm building up the strength in my left-hand fingers, particularly the little finger, with a D'Addario finger exerciser.

Swapping to chopping progress

Coal Porters on the Stade, Hastings, 26 Sept 2015

As well as changing from open to Bluegrass chop chords I will also be abandoning the capo as far as possible. I have also changed plectrum from a rather flexible 0.50mm to a stiffer 0.60mm which works better for chop chords and will also be better for picking individual notes.

The prospect of changing all my songs all at once seemed daunting, so I started with the three-chord trick for songs in G. I was already familiar with using X523 for G and 523X for C, so I just had to learn 245X for D. At first I tried to play this D chord with the first, third and fourth fingers but then switched to the first, second and third fingers. It's more of a stretch but less of a mental challenge. I'll try to develop the G into a 7523 G later.

Next up it was songs in the key of D, requiring the D, G and A chords. Having done the D and G chords it was just a question of adding the extra two fingers to the 2200 A chord to create a 2245 chop version. In terms of fingering shape this A chord is closely related to the 245X D chord so changing between them is easy.

Other keys I need to play in are A, Bb and E, but they are simply obtained by moving the chord shapes for G and D further up the neck. This requires more accuracy. If you're playing chop chords in first position and you accidentally hit an open string you can get away with it, but if you do that further up the neck they won't be in the same key and may sound out of tune. In order to flatten the learning curve I'm currently shoe-horning A songs into G and E songs into D.

The G/A and D/E songs account for over half the songs in my current repertoire. That leaves a couple of C songs, several minor/modal songs, and a few songs that really call for seventh chords or relative minors if I am playing solo. I've worked these out. All I have to do now is smooth out the chord changes.

The Bluegrass 7452 D chop chord

The 7452 chord (left) is actually only a D3 chord like the
745X (right). The 245X (centre) is a full D chord, albeit
an inversion.

I've felt for some time now that my playing style was too intermediate, i.e. it tended towards Bluegrass in speed and rhythm but used open chords. Apart from anything else, this created a lot of volume and drowned my vocals, especially in a purely acoustic environment. I learnt to counter that by muting the strings with my right palm during the verses, but I've now decided to play chop chords in order to go in a more authentic Bluegrass direction.

One thing that long intimidated me about playing in Bluegrass style was what I presumed to be the importance of the four-finger 7452 D chop chord, but further research in books and online suggests that even Bill Monroe more often used the three-finger 245X chord. And then there is the 745X D3 chord which is what I'm currently using for a closed D chord.

I realise that chords are not played in isolation and that the 7452 chord has its advantages in certain situations if you are able to play it, but I'm very glad to learn it's not mandatory as I'll be able gradually to switch over to closed chords without suffering any hiatus in performing.

Balancing rehearsal, maintenance and development

Daily practise is important not only for development but just for maintaining my voice, lyrics and playing.

Scheduling and prioritising my practice time has always been a big issue for me. Ideally I would do several 20 minute periods each day, but real life doesn't work like that. Some days I don't get a chance to do any music at all. On other days I'm reluctant to give up a practice slot after 20 minutes in case I can't get back to it. The end result is that I probably do an average of about 30-40 minutes a day (or 12-18 songs).

I currently have about 30 songs in my new repertoire of American roots music, with another 30 in development. There is obviously a great pressure to rehearse the songs I'm planning to perform next, but I also have to maintain the rest as well as working on new songs and techniques.

I've never found the perfect answer to this and my schedule keeps on changing. I'm currently dividing my time between:
(1) Learning new songs with the guitar.
(2) Rehearsing known songs and learning new songs with the mandolin.
(3) Reviving old songs with the concertina.

The songs with guitar have different styles of accompaniment so development of technique is intrinsic. I ought to be developing mandolin and concertina technique as well, but there just isn't time to do everything.

Dread nought!

Washburn WD10SCE

I've had a guitar of one sort or another since I was a teenager. In order to get one, I had to promise my academically-orientated parents that I would "never join a group". Perhaps that parental injunction induced a lifelong musical inhibition. Anyway, the guitar has just been a bedroom instrument and I've never publicly performed with it as far as I can remember.

The guitar was my first serious instrument, but I didn't give it the time that I was later to put into the concertina and mandolin. I'm not backtracking (yet) on my preference for playing the mandolin, but I decided that I wanted to be able to perform in more varied ways and the guitar was an obvious option given my long if undeveloped association with it.

My last guitar developed a warped neck which made it harder to play than my mandolin. I therefore decided to replace it with a Washburn WD10SCE Electro Acoustic Dreadnought Guitar which is remarkably good value. Although I perform acoustic music I wanted a model with an electric pickup owing to the decline of folk clubs and the growing ubiquity of open mic sessions.

I got the guitar just after Christmas and began to work up some songs - two traditional folk songs I've dabbled with over the years and a well-known Blues number I first started to learn but never pursued almost fifty years ago! After nine days of attempting to refresh my skills, I played all three songs at the Orpy practice session - the first public appearance with a guitar of my whole life! Whilst the songs are all at an early stage of development, the performance went better than I expected and I received some valuable advice and encouragement.