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Modest Mandolin Malarky

A place where I'll note occasional mandolin news in my life.

  1. Sampling

    Here's sound sample of the results of my efforts. It sounds kind of rough to my ears. I would work to smooth out my picking so variation in dynamic is more subtle and less harsh when I'm emphasizing some of the high notes in the melody section. In our performance I played melody, so I'm a bit rusty on the harmony.

    As I've mentioned before, I have the utmost respect to those whose recording sound good, 'cause making a decent recording is very hard work.
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  2. Success

    Success is in the eyes of the audience, it seems. Jeff and I had a very successful performance this morning. There must have been well over 100 people/co-workers/administrators in the audience. We both choked a bit at different times, but both kept playing through it all. It felt great to hear lots of very positive feedback throughout the day. Biggest high for me was simply playing a duet together with someone else who enjoys it. The timing was good, tone was good, mutual support was good. I'd gladly ...
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  3. Onward

    More practice on that transition is helping. Taking things very slowly to analyze the hand and finger movement to make it happen have really started to pay off. Holding the last G with my ring finger while starting to move my index finger up is the trick here. It brings back old "shifting" memories when I played cello many years ago.

    Speaking of 'cello, I got to play around on a wonderful baritone guitar this morning. Got me chomping at the bit for the 4 string 'cello still ...
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  4. Upward

    Got to play both melody and harmony many times over the weekend. The tune is finally starting to sink in and fall under my fingers. The transition is slowly getting easier. Got to play it once briefly with Les at our church retreat. That helped tremendously. Now to actually get together with Jeff and practice the thing. Only 10 days to go.
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  5. Onward

    Continuing to work-out the transition. Taking it slow. Also practicing some with my eyes closed so I can simply "feel it" instead of count on my eyes to "see it." Haven't touched that harmony part since day 1.
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  6. Progress

    Got some time to watch the video this morning and finally take a good look at notation. I now have a much better sense of the tune and am working on getting the fingering down. Learning is not as difficult as in the past, but working through the transitions will be another story. The B part is played up to the 14th fret. Getting the timing of moving from first position at the end of the A part to fourth(?) position at the beginning of B, then sliding up to ninth position(?) is somewhat challenging. ...
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  7. Projects

    I usually play at church on Sunday afternoons and don't do much else during the week due to family needs, bike advocacy, and contra dance organizing. I used to run two local jams, cut back to one, then let go of the organizing entirely. They're well-kept by others now. I'd like to do more practice and have challenged myself to play a duet with a co-worker at our employer's Christmas breakfast event in a few weeks. We'll play Norman and Nancy Blake's Mandolin Fanfare. It's new to me, so it'll be ...

    Updated Nov-29-2008 at 12:31pm by PhilGE

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