Well I just erased a whole dissertation on how and why I stumbled onto the following. I'm just gonna lay it out. Take out your mandolin. Tune one string of each course down a quarter tone or so. Leave the other one alone. Play a tune - play it a bit softly. Yeah, it does sound awful. But do it again and listen. Do you hear a two-note jangly discord with each note in the tune? Or do you just hear a single tone that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong? If the latter, you are hitting only one string; if the former, you are sweeping through both strings. I stumbled onto this in my attempts to shallow out my picking motion. Sounds a bit like a Homer and Jethro skit; I think it is fun because it drives wife and cats crazy.
I think it is fun because it drives wife and cats crazy. I've done this on occasion (usually with the A string for some reason) when tuning and my wife always gives me that look. I'm curious, do you find yourself occasionally hitting one string on the G or D vs A or E? I'm trying to watch this closely as well and when I try to increase my speed (relatively speaking), I seem to occasionally miss one of the G or Ds. Hope that makes sense. -Bill
Mandoweather, I don't know what makes sense at this point. Surely, not me! All I know is I get to playing something all untuned like this, then I get to laughing, then I can't tell where I am in the tune because I can't even hear the tune anymore. What I can say is I don't know if this exercise is really any good for anything other than laughs. This started out to be serious. Really. I promise.
"Fun Pick Stroke Exercise" - yeah, because playing out of tune like that would probably give me a stroke.
I don't have perfect pitch but that would be more than I could handle. BTW as a kid my piano teacher had perfect pitch and we discovered that we could make her cringe by playing a scale and stopping one note short of the octave
Kevin, that's supposedly how a musician's wife—I want to say it was Pablo Casals, but can't remember for sure—would get him out of bed in the morning. C D E F G A B . . . on the piano!
Henry, this seems to be a simple and effective way to work out the newbie tendencies to dig in with the pick or flat out miss one of the pairs. When I first acquired my Pava, for whatever reason, I was inconsistently striking the pair of G strings. Much like mandoweather described. The only cats worth having around are slightly crazy. I'm declining to comment on several crazy women who have been part of my life.
Actually, Trav, that is pretty much what I was working on when I stumbled onto this eardrum rattling exercise. Specifically, trying to reduce pick click when playing over the fretboard. I have floridectomized one mandolin and scooped another, but I want to play even farther up, like over the 19th fret. You get some really "sweet" tone up there but pick click absolutely ruins the effect.
Sweet tone is what we all strive for. I have been watching Sharon Gilchrist video's and she has a superb sound will playing up the neck. Example: her work with Peter Rowan and Tony Rice.
