"ASAP Bluegrass Mandolin" by Eddie Collins

[LastMohican]

Cats:

The first "method" book I used was the obligatory Bert Casey's Mandolin Primer and I sure learned a lot from it. I still use it and there are still a few songs towards the end that I haven't even started to learn.

A few weeks ago, just as a means of "switching it up", I felt compelled to find a new guide to start working out of.

I start with Jethro Burn's book and, while it's well built, the arrangements are very jazz & swing centric and I want to focus on my pursuit of Bluegrass. I'll come back to this book again down the road.

I then tried Dix Bruce's "Getting Into Bluegrass Mandolin" and, for me, this turned out to be a poor choice. There seem to be no "flow" to the path of instruction. The selected arrangments for learning were boring and the audio support from the CD's also had no logical progression.

I then moved on to "ASAP Bluegrass Mandolin" by Eddie Collins. This is a good book. He literally "builds" songs from the ground up by adding complexity with additional versions. Along the way he throws in companion theory material. As to the CD's, the first performs each track in a "basic" or "learning" version and the second performs most of the same tracks with accompanimnet and the more complex solo's.

Eddie represents that the material provided in this method should equate to about two years worth of material and this seems about right to me.

I've not seen this book metioned in any previos post so I wanted to provide my endorsement for any beginners (like me!) looking for quality practice/study materials.

Pick, grin, & live,

Mo