Mandolin buddy Adam Paul of Houston, Texas requested recently for me to do an instructional video on incorporating octaves into mandolin soloing. The following are Parts 1 and 2 of that video. Instructional tab to come.
I’ve recently become National resonator happy and have become owner to a couple of vintage Triolians: a 1929 Triolian mandolin and a 1933 or 34 Triolian tenor guitar. I’ll post more on them later. For now here are some videos.
A few months ago someone messaged me through YouTube asking for some far out rock with “Frankenstein” being one of the requests.
I worked this up over a period of a couple days. Hard part is keeping track of all the parts. Hope you enjoy!
The purpose of this lesson is to demonstrate the application of one of my favorite backup guitar riffs (usually heard in fingerstyle guitar, though not exclusively) to the mandolin.
It’s a fairly simple riff to understand; it’s another to do. The gist of it is that you’re creating tension by taking a major chord and making it a 7th chord. And, of course, you’re doing this within a particular bluesy rhythm.
The difficulty is 1) holding that major chord on the mandolin and doing the walk while holding that chord and 2) playing consecutive up strokes at times on the top pairs of strings.
This riff is easier to do on guitar, as it is a guitar riff. It’s a little harder on mandolin given the tension of the strings and the difficulty this causes in holding that chord sufficiently so you can do the walk on the top string. The cramped fret spacing also contributes to this difficulty. Again, it’s a guitar riff and on guitar it’s pretty easy.
Also, being from fingerstyle guitar–especially with what I associate with the Lightin’ Hopkins school of thumb/index finger style of playing, the top notes of the chord are played with an upstroke. The bass notes (here, the G and D strings) are played with a downstroke; the treble notes of the chord (on the A and E strings) are played with an upstroke. In the Hopkins style, thumb is the down and finger is up. Yank Rachell played guitar this way and you could hear that influence in his mandolin picking as he favored upstrokes.
Tablature is on The Transcribable page. Here’s the YouTube demo:
