Who does not play bluegrass?

[Rick Schmidlin]

I am playing less bluegrass, some fiddle and old time,classical and more comtempary pop and rock and Brazilian. I love bluegrass but there is some much more.

Who does not play Bluegrass?

[Jim Garber]

I have never played bluegrass but played old time fiddle, mandolin and guitar for many years. More classical and Italian these days but that is what I am into. I like bluegrass but more the vocal aspect of it, tho I do appreciate super fast picking, I much prefer the more bluesy variants and slower tunes.

[LKN2MYIS]

I love jazz and blues. Love to play classical, but I'm lost at it.

I guess jazz would be my first choice, blues my second.

[a12]

What Jim said.
I really am drawn more to old time rags
and ragtime too.
I don't have the vocals either to sing bluegrass anyway.

[TomTyrrell]

I used to play bluegrass a lot, almost exclusively. Now I play bluegrass once a year.

I got tired of hearing "that ain't bluegrass" whenever I would throw something new in a solo. I mean, how many times can you play some other guy's stuff before you want to do something of your own? Finally dawned on me that if what I'm playing isn't bluegrass I should play whatever it is.

[Denny Gies]

I play bluegrass and some dawg stuff but must confess the bluegrass seems to be really in my bones and presents constant challenges to my technical expertise. I love it.

[Keith Erickson]

Love Bluegrass ....or anything with a mandolin.

...but my problem is that my only time that I have dedicated to music is for our church choir. My time has been severely whittled down due to entertaining our 18 month old son.

[Doug Hoople]

I only play bluegrass when it's what's being spoken, and find myself in those situations fairly rarely. My relationship to the stuff is highly conflicted... there are aspects of bluegrass that I love, and aspects that are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

These days, I'm embarrassingly poor at it, so I generally case my instrument and just listen when it's in the air.

In order of time on the instrument, I play:

Brazilian choro
Brazilian MPB
Celtic
Classical (mostly Bach)
Blues
Gypsy jazz/swing
Modern jazz
Bluegrass

I'd love to play oldtime, but my playing is too stylistically polluted for the general level of authenticity that oldtime players look for.

[Steve L]

I've never been drawn to it. I came to the mandolin through the Irish/Scottish bands of the 70's. It's noble music and I respect it but I don't like it.

[Gutbucket]

I love fiddle tunes, but is this true Bluegrass? I hear Bluegrass pickers playing fiddle tunes, but they pre-date Bluegrass music. I still love three part harmony and high lonesome type singing and Monroe-style licks and probably always will. But I like what Thile, Dawg, and Pinkham are doing, too.

[Brandon Flynn]

I don't really play it anymore. Maybe once a month I'll play through my repetoire of fiddle tunes. I don't play Bluegrass mainly because I don't yet have the knowledge to take a good solo and I can't play the fiddle tunes as fast as they are generally played CLEANLY. I've played with some fiddle players that start out too fast for their ability and the song changes tempo sporatically. And the banjo players generally fly, because they're just using the same picking patterns for each chord on every song. You can play a lot more notes fast with three fingers as opposed to one pick.

[JEStanek]

I don't. I enjoy a good bit of it to listen to. I like playing folky, old timey, fiddle tuney, Episcopal Hymnal stuff, medieval - ren-faire stuff too.

FWIW, I love lots of different genres of music, I just don't feel pulled to make those styles my music.

Jamie

[bjc]

Coming from the rock guitar world...I play a small amount of BG...mostly classical, folk, jazz...I'm considered a freak by most mandolin players...Typical encounter: "Hey man play (insert standard here)..." Me: "Why don't we jam on some jazz..." Mandolin playing dude: "What?"

[John Flynn]

I have played BG. I have taken BG mando lessons, classes and workshops (with some of the greats) and even performed BG a few times. I have played in many BG jams. I do all right at it: I have a great chop and I can do credible-to-good solos even if I don't know the tune. I know I could get really good at it if I wanted to. But I just don't care for it for several reasons.

First, I don't like to listen to it much. I like Monroe a lot, but only in moderate doses. Just about anything else strikes me (and this is just MHO and only applies to me) as acoustic country/pop music with all the problems of commercialism that the rest of country pop has. Too formulaic, too commercial, too twangy, too out of touch with any real roots. (BTW, suggestions of "who I need to listen to" to get "cured" of this attitude are not welcome. This is not an attitude I come by for lack of experience and I am just not interested, thank you very much.)

Second, I find playing BG annoying. To me (just me, OK) it is chop, chop, chop punctuated by frantic solos. Not very rewarding. Also, BG has three-finger-pick resonator banjo players. I actually like this instrument when it is played really well, but it is one of the most annoying instruments on Earth when not played really well. Fourth, a lot of BG is harmony singing and I am not a singer. So all in all, it does not hold much appeal for me.

I like old-time, Celtic and church music, both to listen to and to play.

[Paul Kotapish]

I play very little bluegrass these days. I like it and have been listening to it for 40 years or so, but my way into playing acoustic music in general (trading in my ES 335 for a D-28) and mandolin in particular (buying that first Harmony) was through tradtional dance music for old-time southern squares, New England contradances, Irish set dances and ceilidhs, French country dancing, Quebec and Cape Breton sets, etc. My playing is mostly in the context of dance bands, old-time string bands, or mongrel-music ensembles that play everything. The last real bluegrass band I was in folded in the early '80s.

As for listening, bluegrass occupies a very small niche in my broad tastes. I'm just as interested in old-time, Irish, jazz, pop, rock, blues, country, Quebecois, all sorts of African, Asian, Scandinavian, French, Bulgarian, Italian, and classical and modern string chamber music--pretty much everything except most hip hop and modern country msuic--and I even like some of that. If I listen to recorded bluegrass these days it's much more likely to be a classic Stanley Brothers or Bill Monroe record than any of the current hot bands. At a festival I give everything an ear.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just one guy's opinion

[Uncle Choppy]

I'm in the UK and I never quite understand what "Bluegrass" really is.

I try and learn stuff from my Sam Bush DVDs but is this "proper" Bluegrass or fiddle tunes?

I've heard some incredible Bluegrass stuff and I love that ambiguity of major/minor that seems to be a feature and (for me) puts the blue(s) in bluegrass. One of my favourite CDs is the sublime "Bluegrass Mandolin Extravaganza" but I sometimes struggle with the stuff done by the blokes in matching powder-blue suits and stetsons. Dare I even say this (..gulp) but I don't quite get the Bill Monroe thing and I suppose this means that I can't possibly like any Bluegrass.

What's odd is that over here, nobody thinks twice about calling Planxty "Irish" music and yet there are clearly massive influences from the USA, UK and Balkan Countries.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I sometimes worry that bluegrass has "painted itself into a corner" by paying excessive respect to the master(s), and that this might not be a good thing.

Sorry to answer a question with a question but "what actually is Bluegrass?".

For example: I had Compton/Long's "Stomp" on in the car today and thought it was great but although I know that Mike "does the Bill" like no-one else, I understand that Stomp is more Old-Timey, or is it?

[g-mac]

My time has been severely whittled down due to entertaining our 18 month old son.

Man, I hear ya! Kid time definitely cuts down on practice time. You gotta squeeze it in the cracks of your day. Of course, there will come a time when the kids *don't* want to spend time with you, so you have to enjoy it while you can.

For me, some bluegrass/fiddle tunes, but more jazz and classical (well, really just Bach).

[steve V. johnson]

I don't play bluegrass.

I came close back in the mid '70's. I was going to local jams and playing guitar. BG was not part of my background, which was blues. BG
was among the musics played in these house gatherings and I began to get a bit of a feel for it. Then Tom Sparks and David Grissom began
to come to these evenings. Tom now teaches violin making at Indiana University and is an All-Ireland fiddle champion and has played guitar
oh... probably from his time in the womb... or so it seems... Grissom was fairly new to town at the time, a univ. student I think, and has since
gone on to play with John Mellencamp for a while and then a fine, fine career based in Austin, TX. You may have heard him recently with the
Dixie Chicks. (Nice job.)

In about twenty minutes of playing with these guys I learned that I would never be able to move that fast, nor to understand the form of BG
guitar as well as they did, so from then on I played on other stuff and just soaked up the BG stuff, but I didn't really follow bluegrass and
wandered off back to more blues-related things and later some jazz playing.

I came to mandolin from playing bouzouki in Irish music. I figured I might as well try a little one since I had a big one. I find that I have some sort of block to learning Irish tunes on mandolin. I'm struggling with it, but it is really tough for me. I find that tremendously odd, because the tunes feel as natural as breathing on the zouk... but there it is ... I'll keep beating on it, tho.

Our local Irish and Oldtime communities cross over a bit, so I'm being drawn slowly toward oldtime on mandolin. Actually, on both zouk and mandolin, and I may even add an octave mandolin to the collection specifically for oldtime tunes... I find that I'm a -lot- more comfortable in community-based oldtime and Irish sessions than I am in the world of "breaks" and solos. And, I'm surrounded by a really wonderfully rich lot of bluegrass players, so I can go hear them without any instruments and just enjoy that world as a listener, a fan, a 'civilian', a non-player.

What's really fun is to do gigs with some Irish players and some bluegrass players! There's always some point at which the BG folks say 'I don't know
-how- you can play that stuff so fast!' and, of course, in all sincerity, we grin huge and have to say the same thing back ! Like cousins separated by
musical languages, agonizingly close, but also very, very different.

Also, I find that when I'm around songwriters and original music, I can have some great, great fun playing mandolin in songs... A new thing for me.

Thanks!

stv

[lgc]

Rob Zombie doesn't play BG. Neither does Ben Bernanke.

[JGWoods]

None for me thank you

[garyblanchard]

I'm also not a bluegrass player. I like hearing a good bluegrass band, but that isn't my scene. I'm mostly a folk player. Truth be told, I hardly play the mandolin at all now days. I'm mostly playing original folk-rock stuff on acoustic electric guitar; I've started working with a 14-year-old on electric fiddle and am about to add congas to the mix. I am considering either a pick-up for my Mid-Mo or an electric mandolin somewhere along the line.

[brunello97]

I confess to membership in the Front de la Liberation de la Mandoline (no bluegrass, no classical--that leaves a lot of music left over.)

http://www.mandopolis.org/

I am admittedly schizophrenic in my tastes. I like the Bad Livers from my school days, but that was actually before they had a mando player. #I can listen to some BG, but don't enjoy playing it. #Bill Monroe kind of gives me a hive, however sacreligious that is going to sound around here. I have worn out DGQ'80 in three formats.

Lately it has been tarantellas and tangos, as dance fever has struck the household. And lots of Caruso, particularly at each end of the day.

Now I could see myself playing BASS in a bg outfit.....

Mick

[Brad Weiss]

I never got BG. #Jazz and choro for me. #Not very good at classical, and I noodle some celtic tunes. #Working on some blues.

[Doug Hoople]

Bill Monroe kind of gives me a hive, however sacreligious that is going to sound around here. I have worn out DGQ'80 in three formats.

That's pretty much my category, too! Which I've always found a little ironic, since Monroe is Dawg's towering #1 influence.

DGQ'80 is one of my desert island CD's (and yes, I know it was never released as a CD, but I had it transferred from vinyl).

[Jim MacDaniel]

I've tried to like BG, but it just doesn't click with me. Instead I usually play ITM and Scottish Trad, plus Americana and folky stuff, and some classical. And any rock tune featuring mandolin piques my interest as well.