Trills

[glauber]

I was listening again to Neil Gladd's CD (the owner of the online mandobabes store) and over and over again i'm really impressed with his trills.

I remember reading a Brazilian choro site about mandolin technique, and it had only one sentence about trills: it said "they require perfect coordination between left and right hand". Yeah, no kidding!

How does one achieve this perfect coordination? I assume the usual way? practice slow? Are there any tricks for learning how to trill?

(I have a CD of Chris Thile playing a coffeehouse in 2000, i think, where he tries to do a guitar-type trill, with pull-offs and hammer-ons, flubs, stops and says "trills are completely unacceptable on the mandolin!")

g

[Martin Jonas]

Trills are truly tough for me, so they usually just become a quick repeated note triplet when I play. I asked Alison Stephens about how to play them, and her view was that in classical styles one would always pick the trill out, not mess about with pull-off and hammer-ons on the grounds that left hand trills wouldn't project enough without amplification and wouldn't be crisp enough.

Regarding the note choices when playing a trill, this thread in the classical forum may be of interest to you. It's Victor's valiant quest of playing through and providing technical notes for all 50 variations in Tartini's "The art of bowing" at a rate of one per week. As this is a very heavily decorated piece, with trills, mordants and what have you all oever the place, his technical notes are great in getting a feeling of how one could translate a notated trill into actual picking on the mandolin.

Martin

[Arto]

A couple of years ago, I think, somebody asked the same question and our Alex gave some good advice on training trills. Maybe somebody has the thread filed? Aleeex....?

[glauber]

A couple of years ago, I think, somebody asked the same question and our Alex gave some good advice on training trills. Maybe somebody has the thread filed? Aleeex....?

Is there anything he doesn't know? Yes, please link to the thread if you find it.