Dropping a ball...

I've often struggled with striking a balance between focus and expansion. For most of this year I managed to juggle two genres, multiple instruments and a large number of songs, but in August I ran out of time to bring by Concertina songs up to speed which disrupted my plans for the Broadstairs Folk Festival where I like to perform in the Woodshed session.

I obviously needed to cut down by having fewer songs and repeating them more often, but I didn't want to drop a whole genre or instrument, at least for now. So I purged a few songs across the board, but deciding which and how many to push onto the back-burner is always a dilemma.

After some further thought, I realised the best option was to set a positive course by focusing on what I like best (songs with the Bouzouki) and allowing time to sort out the rest.

(Image by Freeimages.com.)

Review of 2023

Last folk club meeting of 2023

I carved out the time to practice regularly during this year, if only for 20 minutes a day, and this paid off. I should put more effort into learning new technique, but lack of time forces me to concentrate mainly on rehearsing songs for upcoming performance. 

My biggest achievement was reviving my Old Time repertoire with guitar. I hadn't played the guitar regularly since I was a teenager, and it wasn't something I'd used for regular public performance. I'd also not done the OT songs since 2019. But the songs came back and I learnt to play an alternating bass-strum Country Guitar pattern without too much trouble.

I also bought the Tenor Banjo and started doing my Irish tunes on it, which I can now play at least as well as I did on Mandolin. 

With the time spent on Guitar, I somewhat neglected the Irish Bouzouki but I am currently making up for that. 

Medieval Lute 2

My reproduction 4-course Medieval Lute, commissioned from luthier Jo Dusepo, arrived in March of last year. It was beautifully made and I was very pleased with it. 

Unfortunately, I’ve had more pressing Folk and Old Time projects which I had to bring up to speed. As those projects have now stabilised, I can finally give the Lute more attention.

The Lute has a very different feel from my other instruments, mainly because of the bowl back and lightness, but all my stringed instruments are held slightly differently and it's just a question of getting used to it. 

The tuners are friction as on a violin, not geared, and these take some getting used to. I broke one string tuning up, and one of the tied frets came off and had to be replaced. 

It produces a very reasonable volume which will be augmented by thickening up the melody. Melody will be absolutely central. I won't be using any post-Medieval triad chords with thirds. There's no point in having something like this and then treating it like a modern guitar. 

So my options will include doubling notes to create a more rhythmical pattern, strummed polyphonic and alternately picked drones. And then there are embellishments like slides and hammer-ons which seem to come naturally on stringed instruments. All these will be played with a Risha rather than fingers.

I've got a selection of melodies I want to play and these have been tabbed out in Musescore, so learning them is pretty straightforward. The rest is just fun and experiment.

Irish Tenor Banjo

Gold Tone AC-4 

Although I'll continue to play American Old Time fiddle tunes on Mandolin, I wanted a GDAE-tuned Tenor Banjo for Irish tunes. I've always liked the sound, and the resonance is more forgiving than trying to get a perfect tone on a mandolin. 

Besides choosing a specific make and model, the big questions were whether to go for 17 or 19 frets and an open or closed back. 17 frets is easier if you are used to the Mandolin, but there can apparently be intonation issues and a slack G-string problem in Irish (GDAE) tuning. So I decided to go for the longer scale if I could cope with the stretch and/or movement of hand position. This awaited actually trying a 19 which I finally managed in August. It was OK.

The closed back (with resonator) provides more volume but I don't expect to be throwing myself into dedicated Irish sessions and I found the resonator banjos very metallic. The open back ones have a sweeter tone.

I eventually decided on the Gold Tone AC-4 which has a two-way adjustable truss rod (lacking in some more expensive banjos) and is considered to be great value. It seemed proportionate to my beginner status and level of commitment shared, as it is, with so many other instruments. The included case is little more than a dust cover but I had a spare padded gig bag.

Transferring the Irish mandolin tunes to banjo was straightforward. Obviously I had to get use to the increased fret distances, but it essentially feels like playing the same instrument.

Old Time, new times

Reviving my Old Time String Band songs with guitar was intended as a side-line, but it’s worked out well and I’ve been encouraged to give it more priority.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I feel more relaxed performing the American material and can pack more punch into it. This makes for a better performance and more engagement with (noisy) pub audiences, the milieu I often find myself in and most enjoy. The approach, and material, may be less appropriate for some folk clubs and festivals, where I will continue to focus on the trad folk repertoire.

Reviving my Old Time String Band songs with Guitar

I went from trad folk to Americana and back again, never feeling comfortable about pursuing both genres concurrently. But a chance to participate in a new session finally inspired me to revive my American Old Time String Band repertoire alongside my mostly English and Irish folk songs. 

Rather than use the Mandolin, I'm relearning the songs with Guitar as this is more appropriate as a solo instrument. I’ve had Guitars since I was a teenager. I’m not a complete beginner, but I’ve rarely played Guitar in public. 

Right: My Gretsch Jim Dandy parlour Guitar. I originally bought this for Delta Blues but that is another story...

2023

Time for some tunes

Although my collection of songs is never static and although there is always room for developing technique, I’ve now essentially rebuilt my trad folk repertoire. I’ve got 26 songs with Irish Bouzouki, 17 with Crane Duet Concertina and 24 unaccompanied. Although I intend to spend just as much time practising, the race to rebuild a performable repertoire is over.

As a floor singer in a typical folk club evening you usually get a couple of songs, and in singing sessions perhaps four or more. My current plan is to do one Zouk song and one Crane song per session, and then to fill in with acapella songs. This means balancing practice time between the Zouk and Crane. The unaccompanied songs look after themselves.

One area I do need to develop is tune playing. My folk club and the session I go to are both interspersed with English tunes drawn from the Lewes Favourites. They’re not exclusively English, of course, but they’re common in English sessions.

I did manage to learn a number of these on Concertina years ago but I find some melodies difficult to absorb or tricky to play at speed on the Crane, so I want to experiment with just chordal accompaniment, either on the Concertina or Zouk or maybe both.

Hora Concert Irish Bouzouki

Accompanying my singing with Irish Bouzouki has now become my main focus so I decided to upgrade to the Hora 'Concert' Irish Bouzouki. I wasn't unhappy with the basic Hora model, but the improved version is larger, has much better tuners and is more mellow and resonant. This makes the droning arpeggio style more convincing and easier to pull off.

I've now learnt a core repertoire of about 20 songs with the Bouzouki, so can spend more time on developing technique. This year I went to two very useful Irish Bouzouki workshops, one given by Daori Farrell and the other by Jon Doran, two of my favourite performers.

Medieval Lute

 

I fell in love with the handcrafted instrument in the video, a reconstruction of a 4-course Medieval Lute made and played by Jo Dusepo, so I have commissioned one from her. They take about two months to make but there is an eight month waiting list.

The Lute originated from the Middle Eastern Oud to which chromatic frets were later added, but many believe that a quite Eastern approach persisted. This has been a huge area of debate, as indicated here. Nobody  knows for certain how mediaeval instruments were played, so there is a lot of room for interpretation. Styles vary from Fine Art to Folky, and from foursquare European to Silk Road fusion.

Medieval music was modal and harmonised with Unisons, Octaves, Fourths and Fifths but Thirds were considered discordant so I won't be playing any modern triad chords. After a lot of discussion I've decided to have it tuned DADG, a drone tuning which Jo suggested. There is obviously a coincidence here with DADGAD guitar tuning and the Zouk (GDAD).

Irish Bouzouki

I bought a Hora Irish Bouzouki from Romania with the idea of transferring my mandolin skills to an instrument that would be better  for song accompaniment. 

It's really good quality and fantastic value and I'm very pleased with it, but it's quite a bit different from playing the mandolin.

I've enrolled with the Online Academy of Irish Music which not only provides Zouk lessons but includes access to all its singing and instrument courses.

My musical activities have now settled into four main areas:

Singing with Concertina
Sea and other English songs. These are being re-engineered in a more chordal style.

Unaccompanied singing
Sea and other English songs, Irish songs. The mainstay of my participation as a folkclub floor singer.

Singing with Zouk
Predominantly Irish songs. This is a work in progress but I am optimistic.

Mandolin
Essentially Irish tunes. For private enjoyment.

Irish Mandolin

Some accumulated books, though I am
learning mainly through MandoLessons.

My time in Intensive Care at the end of last Summer somehow left me with a dry mouth condition that made singing unpleasant. Scarcely had I more-or-less recovered from that and we were all hit with the Covid Lockdown. The revival of my singing with concertina accompaniment was thus delayed and remains a work in progress, but I have been doing a bit of acapella singing in Zoom sessions. 

I have also just started to learn Irish traditional dance tunes on mandolin. I've always loved this genre and made several attempts to play tin whistle without much success. Thanks to the experience I gained in the Bluegrass and Old Time genres, however, I'm getting further with the mandolin than I did with the whistle. 

It's a great thrill to be playing these tunes but I'm not putting myself under any pressure. My guiding ambition now is just to sing and play for my own pleasure.

Forwards to the beginning again

Shirley Collins: where it all began

Exactly five years after switching my musical focus from English Traditional Folk music and playing the Crane Duet Concertina to Americana and playing the Mandolin, I have decided to reverse direction again.

The Hillbilly band has been fun but I wanted to have a rest and to create more space to explore solo projects. I had a number in mind including Blues Mandolin, but the most obvious option was to revive my English repertoire and relaunch my concertina playing in a new, more chordal, style.

Bert Lloyd with Alf Edwards
on English concertina

Scarcely had I made this decision when my life was suddenly interrupted by a potentially fatal  condition requiring an immediate operation. Fast forward a month and I am now convalescing.

This unexpected time to reflect has given me an opportunity to think about style and I have been particularly drawn back to the very roots of my interest in English folk music. That is the singing of Shirley Collins, particularly when accompanied on Portative Organ by her sister, Dolly, and the singing and concertina accompaniment of Bert Lloyd and Alf Edwards.

It will take me some time - maybe months - before I develop anything performable. In the meantime I will just enjoy dabbling.

Sore Fingers 2, Learning to Learn and some English Trad Folk

Celebrating May
Day with Fowler’s
Troop

At my second Sore Fingers Summer School I was enrolled in Matt Flinner's class. He focused on the first and third Four-Finger Closed Positions and close-harmony double-stops. It was the most valuable Bluegrass tuition I've enjoyed to date and will be central to my plans for future development.

Another significant experience was reading Jonathan Harnum's The Practice of Practice. It wasn't all new to me and I didn't warm to the writer's style, but the book does bring together and bring home some essential points about how you should practice, as well as some interesting ideas for maintaining interest.

I saw a Mummer's Play marking St George's Day and sang a few English Trad Folk songs in the session which followed. I also took my concertina out on May Day to join Fowler’s Troop leading a Jack-in-the-Green procession through Deptford and Greenwich, an annual fixture and re-acquaintance with my English Trad Folk past. I also did some unaccompanied English songs in sessions during the Wessex Folk Festival.

It was interesting to find I could still play the concertina and remember some of my old repertoire, but it didn’t draw me back. I find Americana much more exciting and I feel my own performance flows much more readily in that genre.

Baptism of fire

The Orpy String Band: John Edwards, Rik Lawson,
and Matt Hearing.

The trio I play in had its first couple of gigs in December. We have been playing together on the local session/folk club circuit since January of last year but these were our first proper gigs and went well.

We describe our music as 'Old Time and Americana'. We mainly do upbeat Old Time songs and instrumentals in stringband style with Bluegrass-type chops, and some more modern Country Blues numbers.

I'm not promoting the band here as this blog is just about my personal, and at times, naive, musical journey, but I wanted to mention it as an indicator of progress.

Time and tide

The 'Highly Strung' scratch band at Sore Fingers
(I'm second from right).

A lot has happened since my last post: my first Sore Fingers School, enrolment in a Peghead Nation online course, a succession  of plectrum changes, and, above all, a rewarding collaboration with other musicians.

There are basically three elements to playing Bluegrass-style with a mandolin: vocals, chopping and picking. While maintaining the first two, I'm now focusing on developing the third.

I've learnt a few fiddle tunes and the melodies to some of my songs. I need to learn more, to improve my accuracy and consistency and to embellish the melodies with articulations. The good thing about the mandolin is that there is no shortage of instructional material. I know exactly what I need to do. It just takes time and effort.

Not forgetting the positives

The Stanley Brothers

We all want to do better, but constantly bemoaning one's inadequacies makes you sound and feel like a loser, and that isn't good for one's confidence or credibility. So maybe it's time to reflect briefly on the positives.

When I read some of the posts on Mandolincafe.com about the difficulties of others, I begin to feel grateful that I've got as far as I have. I can sing. I have a repertoire of over 30 suitably Grassy songs which I know by heart. I can accompany those songs using three and four finger chop chords. My timing has improved. And I can usually find the key in sessions and work out the chords if they follow the simple 3-chord trick. I'm used to performing and don't suffer from nerves in the way that many others do.

That's enough self-congratulation. Now back to picking.

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.