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I realized just now that the you-got-your-acoustic-music-in-my-70’s-rock band I had trouble imagining would pretty much sound like most of Led Zeppelin III.

Another good example of the internet falling short: Go to the Mandolin Cafe message board and search for the phrase left hand position. You’ll find lots of very informative and helpful posts, but you won’t be a whole lot wiser for reading them. Several hours spent scouring the internet for descriptions on the best way to hold your left hand while playing mandolin is worth less than five minutes spent face to face with an experienced player, who can show you how it’s done, and give tips and observations based on what you’re doing.

I’ve thinking (and writing) a lot over the last year or so about being in a band. I was fortunate enough to find a laid back, informal bunch of musicians to play with at the now-cancelled Black Sheep session; I had a lot of fun and improved my playing by leaps and bounds when I was attending regularly.

That’s the kind of group I want to be in - people who enjoy playing together, with “success” (however you measure it) as a purely incidental concern. Or rather, where success is measured by how much fun people are having. Musically, I have this idea of an acoustic group with one foot planted firmly in the old-time/celtic camp and the other planted firmly in the classic 60’s and 70’s riff-based blues/rock camp. What the hell does that sound like? I don’t know; I need other like-minded people to jam with to figure that out, and I mean “jam” in the garage band sense of the word– everybody vamping off of everybody else until something unique precipitates out of the mix. Can it be pulled off without sounding like a novelty act? (For example, the increasingly tired meme of putting out Kiss, Metallica, and AC/DC bluegrass cover albums) I don’t know that either.

The simple truth is that I need to get out and play more, or at least find a way to meet more local musicians. Trying to connect online seems like a no-brainer to an introvert like me, but in my experience so far it always falls short. I’ve been on both sides of the Craig’s List equation: I’ve posted a “looking for people to jam with” message, and I’ve also responded to one… in both cases, a few e-mails have been exchanged, and then nothing has come of it.

Similarly, the Banjo Hangout features a players’ directory where you can post a brief profile indicating where you’re coming from musically, if you’re interested in jamming/teaching/whatever, where you are geographically, et cetera. I’ve had a profile there for a couple of years, and although I’ve found that there are plenty of other players nearby I’ve never been contacted, nor have I contacted anybody; it’s an awkward way to meet somebody.

It’s easy for a web developer to forget that there are a lot of people out there who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe the internet… maybe flyers, judiciously posted at music stores and coffee houses, are the way to go. In any event, I’ll need to work on my mandolin chops for a while before trying to take this to the next level.

Apart from being adrift again for much of the summer, my one reliable musical outlet was taken away when the Black Sheep Deli abruptly cancelled the weekly old time session that had been held there every Thursday for a number of years. I wasn’t there on the night in question, but apparently several regulars showed up and were told unceremoniously that they couldn’t play there any more.

The last time I got out and played with other folks was at the John Putnam Fiddler’s Reunion back in September - and even that was a bit of a letdown, as most of the circles didn’t feel particularly open or friendly. (If you want to be in a members-only band with your friends, then form a band and get some gigs - don’t show up at an open jam and then stand in a tight circle, refusing to make eye contact with people who might like to join in. Sheesh.)

The acquisition of a new camera in September hogged my attention for most of that month. My sister’s wedding, the Keene pumpkin festival, and a couple of other things chewed up October.

As the days get short and cold, though, the musical bug is starting to come back as I contemplate long evenings and chilly weekends stuck indoors. I recently made the mistake of asking to try out a used Epiphone MM-50 mandolin at a music store, and wound up putting it on layaway until I can get back there to trade in my Kentucky KM-150s. I will admit to suffering from scroll envy on a purely aesthetic level, but I also found that I really liked the balance of the F5 style’s larger peghead, and the slightly mellower tone the Epiphone has compared to my Kentucky.

This time around, I want to make a more serious go of the mandolin; I had only had my Kentucky for about a month when I won my Goldstar banjo, and I never got any further than dabbling with some “teach yourself” type tab books. This time I want to take some lessons to make sure I don’t develop any bad habits, and learn the things that are uniquely mandolin; movable chord forms/scales, double stops, picking/strumming techniques, etc. I’ve taken to lurking on the Mandolin Cafe message boards, and am gaining a better appreciation for the fact that playing mandolin isn’t exactly like flatpicking a tiny guitar.

Learning a four-string instrument tuned in fifths also makes tremendous sense in terms of the other instruments I want to learn someday, including fiddle (GDAE, same as mandolin) and tenor banjo (CGDA).

As for clawhammer banjo, I feel like I’m in a good place to put it down for a while. Not completely –there’s no reason not to pick it up and knock out a few tunes every week to keep myself from getting rusty– but now that I don’t have a weekly jam to go to I’d rather focus my energy on something new for a while.

As for 3-finger Scruggs/Reno/Melodic style bluegrass banjo, I’ve made peace with the fact that I lack the drive to spend the hundreds of hours of practice I would need to become a proficient bluegrass player, much less a proficient crossover Béla Fleck-type player. I know better than to sell or trade away my wonderful Gold Star GF-85, though - the bluegrass bug is bound to bite me again sooner or later.

There are other factors at work too, but more on those later.

It’s been a hectic second half of the summer and between heat-waves, a bit of travel, and general stress I’ve managed not to play as much music as I did the first half… all it took was missing 2 or 3 sessions in a row at The Black Sheep and I’m treading water again. It’s really remarkable how much more I want to practice and learn new tunes if I feel like I can show it off at the following week’s session - or at least have the self-satisfaction of being able to keep up with the chord changes at speed.

College will be back in session soon, and hopefully that will result in a healthier crowd; there have been a few complete no-show weeks this summer, which is also a downer. I’m sure once I get back in the habit, my clawhammer enthusiasm will rebound.

In the meantime, though, electric guitar and mandolin have been calling out to me. I almost bought a modest practice amp with a bit of birthday money (I sold my old 20 watt Fender amp before we moved east; I hadn’t used it in years and I had bigger fish to fry at the time), but ultimately decided to spend the money on banjo parts instead. The other night I plugged my guitar into GarageBand and spent an hour or so whaling away into my headphones. (I downloaded some Foo Fighters tabs and confirmed what I had long suspected, that it’s just as fun to play along with them as it was to play along with Kiss/Led Zeppelin/Aerosmith in 8th and 9th grade.) My chops are mighty rusty, though, and I put my guitar away freshly reminded that I can devote my energies to being very good at one instrument, or mediocre at several.

That same night I caught the last episode of DIY Network’s Handmade Music series following the construction of a Dudenbostel F5 style mandolin, which served to remind me yet again how much I like that instrument, and how I still want to get a bit better at it than I can on my own armed only with a pile of “Teach Yourself” books. I still have a nagging suspicion that I’m holding one or both of my hands (and perhaps the instrument itself) incorrectly, and those are the sorts of technique things that I need somebody there to show me/correct me. My Kentucky KM-150s is a fine beginner’s instrument, but I will confess that I continue to lust after an F5 style mandolin for purely aesthetic reasons. And of course, watching Lynn Dudenbostel put the finishing touches on one made me long for the skills and equipment to build something like that myself.

In the end, it always comes back to money… supposing I found a Mandolin teacher charging $40 per hour, and supposing I had an extra $40 per week kicking around (which I certainly do not right now), do I spend $160 per month on lessons, or do I squirrel it away towards tools, supplies, and training for lutherie? At the moment it is a purely hypothetical question, so perhaps I should get reacquainted with my banjo.

Because there is, oddly enough, a glut of banjo players around here I’ve been thinking it would be nice to get comfortable enough with my mandolin that I can take it along to jam sessions and at least be able to hack along with the I / IV / V chords (and occasional ♭VII) that make up most of the tunes in the event that 3 or 4 banjo players show up.

It’s also partly a matter of strategy; someday I plan to have a go at the fiddle, and since the fingerings are the same any work I put in towards mandolin should give me a leg up when I eventually get my hands on a decent violin and some instruction.

Plus there’s the 4-string, mandola-scale cigar box guitar that I’m currently building. The tuning is one fifth lower (CGDA) but the interval from string to string is still one fifth, so there’s a lot of carry-over there, too. Once I finish the thing I want to be able to play it well enough to get something recorded on it!

I haven’t gotten much from my few mandolin books that I didn’t already have from years of plectrum guitar; they’re very tab oriented and gloss over theory as it applies to the instrument, or scales.

Thinking back to my teenage guitar lessons, one of the most useful things my teacher ever did was to teach me the blues scale, and touch on the basics of improvisation. Most importantly, as you diddle around the scale make sure you hit the root note of each chord as it changes. He diagrammed out a closed-position, pentatonic blues scale for me and wrote the locations of the I, IV, and V root notes, and I spent quite a lot of time working on just that. I got pretty good at cheesy blues jamming with my friend, who was taking lessons from the same guy. (Thanks, Chris - If I could track you down via Google I’d drop you an email!)

So, I decided to start working on the same thing for mandolin, starting with Deep Ellum Blues (AKA Deep Elem Blues). It happened to be played at the People’s Pint last Wednesday, and got stuck in my head. I think it was in D, so that was as good a place to start as any. I do love how logical mandolin is; look at the way everything repeats one octave higher on the 5th string of each subsequent fret! (And two octaves higher on the 10th fret of the next string, etc.) I imagine it’s quite a bit easier to master the fretboard than guitar or banjo.

And of course, I’m not about to put my banjo down either… although the old-timey stuff seems to have pulled me away from the bluegrass/melodic practice I was threatening to do all summer. Playing with other people is addictive like that.

Relatively instant gratification Originally uploaded by Usonian.

I’ve been busy playing at jams and working on this cigar box instrument this past week (more over at Build Notes), and the constant rain of the last six weeks hasn’t been very inspiring in terms of writing. (You L.A. people can just shut up. I know all I did for the six years I was there is complain about the lack of weather, but if I wanted this much rain I would have moved to the pacific northwest.)

I just spent about 45 minutes with my Gold Star banjo after at least a week or two of neglect. Not for want of practicing other instruments, though; there’s guitar class to prepare for, and lately the SS-10 has been calling to me louder than the GF-85.

Most of that 45 minutes was spent working on exercises 1-6 in Pat Cloud’s Key to 5-String Banjo. Last night’s guitar class lit a bit of a fire under my ass to learn my instrument beyond memorizing how to play songs and move chord shapes around, so back to the book I went.

In the right mood, like tonight, repetetive practice of technical exercises feels good. It’s neat to feel new patterns burning their way into your brain, and feeling like the muscle memory you’re building up in your left and right hands will be useful in a more general way than when you focus on learning a single tune. I guess the trick is finding a way to get into this mood on a regular basis. Guitar class is winding down, and I hope to really refocus on banjo over the summer.

Tagged:

• banjo
• practice

My friend Charlie appears in Nancy Rica Shiff’s Odder Jobs, a collection of photographs of unusual occupations. Charlie plays the Theremin:

Photograph is © Nancy Rica ShiffI was lucky enough to see Charlie perform a few times before moving away from Los Angeles… he is one of the best! Theremin has been on my list of instruments to try someday for almost as long as banjo… in fact, for a while I expected I’d buy a Theremin first. There is still a MoogMusic Etherwave Kit out there with my name on it.

Tagged:

• theremin