Many of us meet beginner musicians who have bought an instrument, have all the
instruction stuff and constantly listen to bluegrass CDs – and they keep asking, What is
the secret? How do you get that sound?
I believe the answer is, use your ears and practice, practice, practice.
For all of us, playing music involves a lifetime of listening. In one of the first
sessions I ever joined as a very tentative beginner with my new guitar, the bass player
leaned over and said dismissively, “You’re out of tune.”; That guy did me a
favour. He made me realise the importance of tuning, and also that when you’re playing
with other people you can be an absolute pain if you don’t get it right. There are two
reactions to criticism. One is to crawl away and give up. The other is to practice and
improve.
There is no secret trick to playing music. I sometimes tell people that all you have to
do to play the mandolin is to move your pick down and up. OK, you’ve also got to fret the
strings, but honestly that’s all there is to it, to actually make the sounds. Everything
else is down to Timing, Touch and Taste. Here are a few aspects which you need to
consider.
Timing: playing in time (99% of bluegrass is strict tempo music – when in doubt, listen
to the bass); being able to bounce and syncopate your playing, whether it’s chordal
rhythm, riffs or solos; being able to play behind or ahead of the beat (hold back or
push) without altering the basic tempo
Touch: getting an appropriate sound out of your instrument – good tone; playing loud or
soft; controlling your pick movements, not just thrashing
Taste: choosing what you play – of course you will be limited by your technical
abilities, but even an amateur like me can choose how to approach a break or how to back
up a vocalist. Often, less is more. Develop a sense of theatre, for example find some
lonesome bluesy licks to provide fills in a sad song, or push fast major scales on top of
the beat in a pacey number. Learn when to tremolo and when not to – it’s a powerful
dramatic device. (Buzz Busby and John Duffey were two of the masters of when to use
tremolo, IMHO.)
You learn all this stuff by listening, playing with other people and practising on your
own. For the average family person there can be difficulties with all three! Here are
some possible scenarios:
Your partner and kids can’t stand your CDs – you’ll have to listen in another room, and
if you want the volume up you’d better use headphones. Listen to music in the car. An for
many years I used a small portable tape recorder around the house while I was doing
chores.
You want to go out of an evening and play, or go to a weekend bluegrass festival – you
have to tread a delicate path here, make sure you get out sometimes but don’t
over-indulge yourself to the extent of neglecting the important people in your life. I’d
have thought that going out once a week to play is not by itself going to threaten your
family stability.
A much more difficult one is regular practice at home. This is essential if you are to
make any sort of progress. There are lucky folks who just seem to play an instrument
naturally, but this is probably not going to be you. It is certainly not me. Jane Wampach
summed it up succinctly many years ago in the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music
Association mag. She pointed out that all the great players have spent many years of
practice to develop their technique. If you don’t practice yourself, expect it to take
longer. A progressing player will typically need between one and two hours a day to stay
on top of things, so you are going to have to find at least this sort of time. Musical
instruments are the hardest of taskmasters. Playing at the weekend is not enough, it’s
gotta be every day. Again there can be big conflicts of interest at home, and it would be
a braver person than me to tell you how to solve this one! However, as Peter Wernick has
pointed out, you can easily miss many hours of television without loss. This has been my
primary solution over the years, together with not getting involved with too many other
major commitments outside the home. Again you have to tread the path between spreading
your energies and interests too widely on the one hand and becoming a picking nerd on the
other.
Only you can decide what commitment to give to your music, just don’t expect it to be an
easy deal. I can only say that I have found enormous mental benefits in learning to play.
It has always been something that I have struggled to do. For this reason it helped me
for many years with my day job as a teacher of English as a second language to adults. It
forced me to recognise that my students also found learning difficult, and it was my job
to find ways to give them insight into how the English language worked so they could
practice and make progress. And yes, they had very busy lives, had to make time to do
their homework and come to class, and sometimes encountered opposition at home to their
starting to learn English in the first place.
As a professional teacher of any subject you are constantly confronting the problem of
nature versus nurture. This is the perennial, indeed the ultimate, issue of education. As
applied to music it means, is musical ability inborn or learned? Most teachers reckon it
is a bit of both, in fact quite a lot of both! Ronnie and Rob McCoury must have inherited
their ability to play music from father Del, but the environment in which they grew up
must surely have fostered their musical interests and development. Ditto the Reno
brothers, two of whom star as members of Hayseed Dixie, Natalie Maines, lead singer of
the Dixie Chicks, Norah Jones, daughter of Ravi Shankar … the list goes on.
Those folks have a super dose of musical genes; you, and certainly I, may have rather
less natural talent. I guess that if you enjoy music and are keen to play it indicates
some natural musical inclination, and practice can only improve things. I still find some
serious limitations to what I can do on the mandolin and that not everything improves
with practice. However, much does get better and that is honestly all I can promise you
if you are setting out on your own musical journey. In view of the sort of commitment I
have outlined above you may feel that this is a tough deal, but unfortunately it’s the
only one on offer. What I can guarantee is that it will be a stimulating and exciting
journey, and that you will surprise yourself by what you are able to achieve.
Enjoy your music!
John Baldry
May 2017
