When I was in college, on a whim one semester I took an elective class called “Yiddish Music Performance Styles,” taught by Professor Hankus Netsky.
Prof. Netsky delivered amazing lectures: a well-researched history of klezmer music's origin in Eastern Europe and...
When you are strumming three or four strings at time on the mandolin, sometimes it’s great to let the notes on each string ring out until the next pick stroke. Open string chords sound great like this.
However, in most styles of music with a beat or a “groove,” you’ll need...
“These are a few of my favorite things….” so goes the great Rodgers & Hammerstein song.
In this post, I’ll simply share a few of my favorite chord voicings, all of which can be found in the solo arrangement of Choro Negro that you can hear in full at the top of the...
The mandolin, with its tightly wound strings and high treble sound, is the ideal instrument to play drum parts in a string ensemble.
For example, an essential function for the mandolin in bluegrass music is playing the snare drum parts of the groove on beats 2 & 4 of every measure - the...
Can you get the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land" into your head for a minute? The first lyric is “This land is YOUR land.”
I’ve used bold and italics to indicate that the song’s first down beat is on the word “your.” So where do we put...
It is very common for students learning traditional Irish dance music to excel at "reels" (the tunes in 4/4 time), while at the same time experience problems playing jigs, the tunes in 6/8 time.
This is perfectly understandable, as most of us have played lots of music in 4/4 time, but have...
The effect called “vibrato” is the default setting most of the time for classical violinists and vocalists.
When the Beatles called in a string quartet for the recording of “Eleanor Rigby,” producer George Martin struggled to convince the seasoned, classically-trained...
When I was a kid, the music I first learned on guitar was "classic rock" - the Beatles, Carole King, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, etc...
A lot of my students play this same type of music on their mandolins. One question that has come up over and over again: "How do...
When I was a teenager, I learned to play the bass in my high school’s jazz band and musical theater pit orchestras.
My first professional musician gigs were on bass as well - old fashioned big band gigs in a tuxedo and musical theater pits dressed in all black.
One great thing I took...
So, you've taken time to learn your major and minor scales. In this lesson you'll learn the secret to using these scales to improvise intelligently and musically over any key.
Here's the way I learned my scales at first, probably the way you learned them too - starting on one and going up...
Back in the '90s while living in Boston I got hooked on learning Irish traditional dance music on the tin whistle. In the performance at the top of this video, I play one of my favorite old whistle tunes on the mandolin.
What drew me in to these otherwise simple, repetitive melodies...
Sliding into and out of notes is an essential part of your mandolin musical toolbox.
I was first aware of slides as part of that cool song intro you hear at bluegrass jams (I'd later learn that this 4-bar intro has a strange name, which I promise I'm not making up, "the...
