NewsFetcher
Nov-17-2011, 7:42am
The Mandolin Cafe has posted the following news release:
John Goodin - Mandolin Tunes (http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_001423.shtml)
John Goodin has announced the publication of a new solo work entitled Mandolin Tunes, now available from iTunes, amazon.com and CDBaby.
http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/uploads/thumb-johngoodin.jpg (http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_001423.shtml)
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vkioulaphides
Nov-19-2011, 1:27pm
I have had the pleasure of listening to this album, and found it instantly attractive and enjoyable. The music is as cheerful and good-natured as its composer, and is sure to make many a mandolinist happy. Highly recommended, both as something to simply listen to, and as some of the nicest, sweetest tunes one might ever want to play.
Three cheers for John Goodin, and for all his contributions to the mandolin-world!
Victor
Scott Wood
Dec-29-2011, 2:51pm
John Goodin opens the door.
I am new to the mandolin and self-taught. To get started in Bluegrass, I am working with Roland White’s ‘Approach to Bluegrass for the Mandolin’. His method is excellent and the Tab music gets you playing right away. But there’s a problem. With the Tab instruction, I can practice, mimic and memorize the tunes, but even when I have the tune down pat, I still don’t know the fretboard. Like a musically trained chimpanzee, I can mimic well but I cannot learn on my own. I know there are scores more instruction books out there, but which to choose? And where on the Web are free downloads of real sheet music available for mandolin? I don’t mean more tabs, or chords, or lyrics but the score, in music notation?
Last month, Mandolin Café ran a feature about John Goodin and provided a link to his ‘So Many Tunes’ blog (http://somanytunes.blogspot.com/) . If you go there, you will meet perhaps one of the very few musicians/artists who maintains a site in the highest standards of the Web: free access to good data. John is a professor of music at Luther College, a multi-talented musician who specializes in the mandolin and a prolific composer. His mandolin tunes in PDF are available free for downloading (within the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works Copyright) and each has an MP3 version so you can hear him play the tune the way it aught to be played. This is generosity that beggars belief in 2011. But there’s more. Since I still did not know how to read music for the Mandolin, I sent John an email asking for his advice on which manual to look for. His response included suggestions for two of the popular methods he thinks are noteworthy, but since he also has reams of mandolin instruction posted free on his website he referred me to one via a link and attached a PDF of another (The Bickford Method for Mandolin), an early 20th Century instruction book as an attachment. In that book there is what I call a music-reading ‘boot camp’ training session that got me reading music on the mandolin in two days.
Roland White’s Bluegrass method is great and I’m staying with it to learn all of his tunes, but John Goodin’s musical generosity has opened the door for me to all music for the mandolin. Now, I can go anywhere.
s.