Available for Kindle and print version.
Progressive Melodies for Mandocello by August Watters is a new collection of original, unaccompanied solos for the baritone member of the mandolin family. It is designed to cultivate musical reading skills, as well as technical facility, and to build skills essential to ensemble playing and solo performance.
The book is designed for use on any computer, using Amazon's free Kindle Reader software.
About the book, Watters told us: "By design, this is intended as a method for building sight-reading as well as technical skills. For that reason this is standard notation only. Plus, it’s already a challenge to format music for the small screen, so everything is visible without stopping to scroll!
"I've looked at a lot of music books on Kindle, and most of them seem to be direct transfers of a print book, which means the music is laid out in portrait mode and thus too small to read easily, once fit to a computer screen that's landscape mode by design. So I've laid out the Kindle version in landscape mode, to match the computer screen. As it turns out, the Kindle format gives the user very little control over how graphics will look, so the book really needs to be formatted with Kindle in mind. When it's time for the print-on-demand book, I'll lay it out differently."
About the Author
August Watters is a multi-stylistic mandolinist, composer/arranger, and teacher, with a special interest in the historical roots of the American mandolin. He focuses on instruments of the mandolin family, including mandolin, mandola, and mandocello.
As an international clinician and soloist, August has performed in Europe, Canada, and the United States. He has presented to a variety of academic and music conferences, including the American Association for Italian Studies, the International Association of Jazz Educators, and the Classical Mandolin Society of America. He has also performed and taught at many music festivals, including Steve Kaufman's Kamp (Tennessee), the Vermont Mandolin Festival, the J. D. Crowe Bluegrass Festival (Tennessee), Mandolin Camp North (Massachusetts), and Ashokan (New York).
August is the author of Exploring Classical Mandolin, (Berklee Press, 2015), New Solos for Classical Mandolin, (Hal Leonard Publishing, 2019), and Progressive Melodies for Mandocello: 40 Studies for Sight-reading and Technical Development (self-published on Kindle, 2019).
August taught at Berklee College of Music for 18 years, where he held the title of Professor of Ear Training. At Berklee, his "Acoustic String Project" Ensemble trained roots-oriented musicians for fifteen years (2000-2014). He also taught a variety of string performance labs for the Berklee String Department, as well as private mandolin lessons.
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