Chris Thile chording Red Haired Boy

[AndyPanda]

I'm new to mandolin and picked up Chris Thile's instructional DVD. I love the way he's playing the chords to Red Haired Boy (though much faster than I can play it at this point).

I pulled it into my DAW and was really surprised at how precisely CT is keeping time. I set a metronome to line up the bars so I could cut/paste easily and he doesn't waver from the clock, at least not when he's playing the chords, when he switches to melody he speeds up.

Anyway ... I did some cut/paste to remove places where he's talking (watch your pinky etc.) and replace with the same chord from an earlier section. Then I spliced the intro and outro and ended up with a nice little accompaniment to practice with. You can use the mp3 with many sorts of players that let you slow it down.

It would be great if someone could teach me how he's getting this groove and the fingerings for all the different chord voicing he's using.

[AndyPanda]

The recording in the previous post seems a bit flat to me - I sped it up a little here and this seems more in tune:

[Mark Gunter]

Hi Andy, I had a look at that section of the video. It is a very good section to study while developing your rhythmic chops. I haven't gotten into young Chris's series of lessons yet, so the only comments I can offer right now are from watching rather than doing.

For the chording shapes and fingerings - this looks pretty straightforward. Chris is mostly utilizing the lower strings to get his rhythmic beat, and he is using a lot of muting with his left hand as he fingers the chords to get that percussive sounds. On the G he is using the straight two-finger G chord and using the higher strings a bit more for those beats, with left hand muting as well; for the A most of the focus is on the A and E notes (4th string second fret, 3rd string second fret) - note that you can play an A chord minus the third by playing all four strings on your mandolin that way; 4-2, 3-2, 2-O, 1-O = AEae

Anyway, I'm sure your patching together an mp3 must be helping you to create a loop to practice with or something, but the best way to study what he is doing - as to fingerings and chord voicings and rhythmic character - is to watch the video and try to mimic. You can slow down the video. His hand and finger positions are visible.

There is your typical bluegrass-style chop muting - which involves a quick sort of release of the fretting fingers pressure while maintaining their place on the strings (I'm sure you're familiar with this type of quick, chop-style muting).

Then there is also some muting of the strings with the left hand that has to do with slapping or quickly, lightly touching the strings with the free left hand fingers that aren't fretting anything at the moment. This is the way of left hand muting open strings to get sort of a chop effect.

Also, there are opportunities to provide muting of a previous note when changing fingerings to new notes or chords.

I noticed all those ways of muting going on when watching the clip. There is a fourth way of providing some rhythmic muting on occasion with the palm of the right hand, but I don't remember whether he made any use of that in this clip. It is something to watch for, and something to experiment and practice with as well.

Here are my suggestions relating to your question:

1. Work on right hand technique. Your "groove" must be in the right hand keeping steady rhythm with alternate pick strokes.
2. Study the fingering as you see it in the video. Find the fret fingerings, understand the notes and how they relate to each chord change.
3. Work on left hand technique as to muting for effect. Watch Sam Bush too who is a master at this.

And, if you haven't printed the materials that go with this lesson series, by all means do that as it may have help with the fingering.

Best of luck with your playing!

[Mark Gunter]

And perhaps you can get more comments if others have an opportunity to actually see what you're referring to.



Chris is also hammering on the notes in some of his chords. There is a lot of sort of advanced ornamentation going on with his left hand technique between the muting and hammer-ons, etc. If you've not played fretted instruments much in the past, there may be too much going on for you to learn all at once, but stepping up to a challenge is also commendable.

I would advise practicing along with the video as intended rather than mocking up an mp3. You can adjust the video speed. In the beginning, you don't need to try and play the chords like Chis does. Practice by playing the chords over his first lead part, then playing the lead to his excellent rhythm, then playing the lead together with him on the last pass.

If you want to dissect and work on learning rhythm technique, just loop the center section, practice it slowly, analyze it as suggested in my last post, and don't give up. You can learn a lot, might take a year or more to really develop your own cool rhythmic style like this.

[AndyPanda]

Thanks for the replies and helpful tips.

To be clear, I mocked up the MP3 so I'd have a grooving backing track that I could slow down (and loop) while I practice the melody.

It hadn't occurred to me to slow down the DVD video - I guess I'll have to figure out how to do that.

[Mark Gunter]

Oh sorry, I thought you had it on digital download. With a DVD, you can rip video to mp4 using a tool like Leawo Professional Media. The free trial version never expires, although it has some restrictions on how long the output mp4 can be.

Anyway, it's great that you're working on cool rhythmic ideas.

[AndyPanda]

Funny, I had searched for a YouTube video of the chords and could never find them - so I was surprised when you posted a link to the YouTube chord section (wondering "how did he find that?" "I gotta step up my searching efforts") .... I just realized that you created the YouTube video yesterday Thanks for that!