Bluegrass Mandolin 101 Exercises

In just under two weeks, on Oct 8th, I’ll be starting up my Bluegrass Mandolin 101 online course. This is an exciting new approach to mandolin lessons online! Each week we’ll have a live one-hour interactive group lesson followed up by a 45-minute group practice session a few days later. All sessions will be recorded so that students don’t have to be there for the live session, and can revisit the lessons any time they want to. Students can ask questions during the sessions either via their built-in microphone or via phone (more info about how that works is here). There is also a chat window in which students can send their questions via text. Students will also have unlimited access to individual videos of the material and PDFs of the music written in both standard music notation and tablature.

Over this eight-week online course, we’ll be covering several bluegrass tunes and looking at various ways of playing them to help you get a more thorough understanding of bluegrass mandolin playing.

The core of the course will include position playing, double stops and standard licks on several standard bluegrass songs, and will start at a fairly basic level and get more advanced as the course progresses. As we learn new songs we’ll also touch on the styles of many great mandolin players including Bill Monroe, Doyle Lawson and David Grisman, among others.

You can view the course schedule here.

Before we start the course, I’m posting a few videos to help students with some fundamentals that will help them with their general technique and enable them to learn the material we’ll be covering more quickly. Basic picking technique is essential to help a student advance and avoid any bad habits. This particular video gives students a picking exercise which will help them keep their picking motion consistent when crossing strings.

http://youtu.be/qRMbCbm7JNw

Here’s the standard notation and tablature for the exercise:

Picking Exercise on Two Strings

We’ve got a couple of other preparatory videos up for students enrolled in the course to cover some more of the basics before we launch into some bluegrass songs. To find out more about the course, visit the Bluegrass Mandolin 101 page.

Come join us for this new approach to online mandolin lessons. I look forward to seeing you October 8th!