I noticed he was doing a new series on the Monroe lineage with both David McLaughlin and Mike Compton participating. The new series also features fewer instrumentals and more breaks for vocal tunes, which I greatly prefer. I paid for his first lesson bundle that he put out last summer and I've found it a really mixed bag. It's worth saying up front that Chris is a hell of a picker and understands this style at a level that only a handful of other people can match. Much like Compton, you get the feel that for Chris, Monroe style is more than just a way to play mandolin...it's really something spiritual. He also seems to be a genuinely decent and thoughtful guy and there are some super powerful common phrases and techniques he introduces that really have added a ton to my playing. However, at least for me, trying to get through the videos has been nothing short of frustrating. It's just Chris playing into, maybe an iPhone or a cheap webcam? The whole thing is unscripted and it shows. A lot of it is just him improvising, playing nearly everything blazingly fast, and then a few minutes later saying something like, "So, it's kind've like that." The speed makes it very dificult to follow, and because he does not believe in transcriptions, this means slowing the video down a lot (often as much as 50%) which slightly changes and garbles the pitch a good bit and thereby kind've undercuts his whole "learn only by ear" system. The fact that the audio is already a little rough certainly doesn't help. I get the idea behind his learn-only-by-ear thing, and I don't agree with it, but it nonetheless strikes me as a technique that works a hell of a lot better when you're sitting across from the guy doing the teaching and are able to say, "Wait...play that again. Can you slow that down? What exactly did you do there, because I didn't quite get it." The limitations that come with the medium of recorded video make learning by ear a really problematic approach if your audio recording is a bit muddy and you're playing so fast that it's hard to seperate many of the notes. That's only compounded if the camera work and lighting is equally rough, making it hard to see what the hands are doing. I can only hope he's improved some of these issues over the course of the 4-5 other lesson modules he's released. Increasingly they were leaning more towards Monroe instrumentals which I really don't have much interest in exploring, however, the new series looks to be right up my alley. Like I said before, the guy has so much to teach...it's a shame that there wasn't some way (at least in the video series I bought) to bring in the professionalism that you find in Peghead Nation courses. God bless him for trying to do these things DIY, but I gotta say, it really does make you appreciate how well produced the Peghead Nation courses are in everything from the sound to the lighting to the camerwork, as well as what I must assume is some direction in the studio, both in terms of telling an instructor when they could explain something better or if they seem to start drifting off topic.
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