John Flynn
Jun-22-2004, 6:24am
My band played at the Ozark Heritage Festival this past weekend. The headlining group was "Perfect Strangers," which by the way, is a great bluegrass band. Thier mando player, Jody Stecher, gave a mando workshop Sunday morning and luckily for me, only one player besides myself showed up. Now, I am pretty skeptical about instruction and workshops. In principle, I am all for them, but I have had several instructors and been to several workshops and I often wind up wondering if they were worth the time and effort.
This mini-workshop turned out to be one of the best hours I have ever spent with an instructor. His approach was to start out by saying, "Play something for me that is really easy for you to play, then play something you are having trouble with." I played two tunes, he listened intently and then he said, "Here's what you need to do..." He gave me three corrections and had me try each one until I got it right to his satisfaction. The result was probably the most immediate improvement I have made in one sitting, ever. I also showed him a break I was developing for a tune my band plays and he gave me some great ideas to improve it.
I would highly recommend any workshop or instruction you could take with Jody.
This mini-workshop turned out to be one of the best hours I have ever spent with an instructor. His approach was to start out by saying, "Play something for me that is really easy for you to play, then play something you are having trouble with." I played two tunes, he listened intently and then he said, "Here's what you need to do..." He gave me three corrections and had me try each one until I got it right to his satisfaction. The result was probably the most immediate improvement I have made in one sitting, ever. I also showed him a break I was developing for a tune my band plays and he gave me some great ideas to improve it.
I would highly recommend any workshop or instruction you could take with Jody.