Is that a thing? What about playing mandolin with finger picks like a banjo?
Is that a thing? What about playing mandolin with finger picks like a banjo?
Eastman MD-514 (F body, Sitka & maple, oval hole)
Klos Carbon Fiber (on order)
And still saving my nickels & dimes & bottle caps & breakfast cereal box tops for my lifetime mandolin.
It makes my fingers hurt just thinking about it. I play banjer bare fingered, same for guitar. They won't let me near fingerpicks. Not after the nosebleed incident.
Toomas Rannu from Estonia does some nice solo arrangements for fingerstyle both of folk tunes and classical pieces. I will port some links or you can search yourself. He is a member here.
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
It's one of the reasons I am prototyping nylon strung mandolins.
Purr more, hiss less. Barn Cat Mandolins Photo Album
It's a highly viable technique that is largely unexplored.
Have at it and enjoy. When you get good at it, pass on to others what you have learned.
The truth is you can do anything you want; it's an instrument, not a lifestyle, and you own it...
When I decided to go with a non-standard tuning, one with similar intervals (and chord patterns) to a 5-string banjo, I also had to decide whether to go with flatpicking or go with finger style. In my case I decided to go with flatpicking because I realized that unlike a non-standard tuning, finger style mandolin would change the whole character of the instrument, and I wanted to play acceptably in bluegrass circles. That has worked out nicely to a large extent; most people I jam with don't realize I use a non-standard tuning.
What I didn't realize then is that flatpicking is also faster than finger style. And for me, now in my later years with RA advancing in my hands, flatpicking on mandolin takes just about zero warmup time to come up to speed, where even with 50 years of 5-string banjo experience, it takes at least 30 minutes for me to come up to speed with finger style.
So depending on your age and hand condition, there may be some advantages to flatpicking... And depending on the genre environment you wish to play with, there may again be some advantages to flatpicking.
That said, there may be some historical president of mandolin-like instruments being played with finger style, as @Bob Clark has mentioned, possibly including with gut or synthetic strings. I don't know the name of the instrument but I am aware of a Spanish / Latin American multiple course instrument being played that way.
-- Don
"Music: A minor auditory irritation occasionally characterized as pleasant."
"It is a lot more fun to make music than it is to argue about it."
2002 Gibson F-9
2016 MK LFSTB
1975 Suzuki taterbug (plus many other noisemakers)
[About how I tune my mandolins]
[Our recent arrival]
In the bluegrass field it has been tried out by fearless musicians like John Duffey: https://www.bluegrasshall.org/induct...n/john-duffey/
I have not come into contact with anyone fingerpicking the mandolin. This is probably because of the factor that the distance between the strings is small and the hands/fingers are big. If you are a mandolin crosspicker (like Jesse McReynolds) fingerpicking is probably an interesting approach.
I have not been aware of any other musical style in which the mandolin is fingerpicked.
Olaf
Wayne Henderson playing with fingerpicks at 7:14.
if you haven't watched this before, start from the beginning, neat video. at the end Andrew Marlin is in the video as well.
I once owned a special "Radim Zenkl" model Breedlove mandola, actually designed for fingerstyle playing which Radim was experimenting with at the time.
It had single strings instead of double courses to avoid getting your fingernails tangled up, the string spacing was a little wider than normal to help the right hand, and it had a humbucker pickup at the end of the fingerboard for volume. It was a very quiet instrument played acoustically that way, so the pickup and amplification was an essential part of the package.
A cool instrument, but I eventually sold it because as a fingerstyle guitarist for some 30+ years, I missed having more strings so my thumb could work a bass line under melody with the other fingers.
Four strings is limiting if you're used to fingerstyle guitar, but maybe worth exploring if you're a mandolin player with no guitar experience. The main problem you'll run into is dealing with the double courses and low volume. I've dabbled a little with fingerstyle on my Weber octave mandolin, where there is a little more room for the right hand, but getting hung up in the string courses is still a problem, and other than the 5ths tuning it has no real advantage over my guitars for this approach.
2020 Northfield Big Mon
2016 Skip Kelley A5
2011 Weber Gallatin A20
2021 Northfield Flattop Octave Mandolin
2019 Pono Flattop Octave
Richard Beard Celtic Flattop
And a few electrics
Pierre Bensusan’s Près de Paris is one of the great all time fingerstyle albums and the second track on the b side is him doing fingerstyle mandolin.
https://youtu.be/gK6j9bkykBk
It wouldn't be too hard to get in that neighborhood by converting an acoustic mandola to single strings with a new nut and saddle, then a pickup if it didn't already have one.
Some builders offer 4-banger electric mandolins and mandolas too. You could probably alter the saddle enough on some models to get a little more spacing between strings. That's the main consideration once you're down to 4 strings. Flatpickers want the strings closer together at the saddle, fingerpickers usually want it wider.
Oh come on! It's not something "brand new".
I've been using right hand fingers for 40 years, usually in the hybrid Tele pick+finger(s) style of guitarists like James Burton, Richard Thompson, Clarence White, Jerry Donahue and innumerable others. As far as my understanding goes, Ry Cooder has often used RH fingers in his mandolin playing, as other guitar players probably have (Ian Anderson, Martin Carthy. Richard Thompson, Duke Levine, Fred Tackett, David Lindley.....) The thing is, you may not hear it as such (because it is so integrated) unless you see them doing it.
Never liked metal or plastic fingerpicks - don't care for the sound, and they are cumbersome. There are far more tonal options available just using the flesh (or sometimes the nail).
For "pure" blues fingerpicking (ala Mississippi John Hurt, Rev Gary Davis etc) which is a solo instrument style, going lower is always an advantage as you are playing both bass and treble parts. And if you are singing, it's best to get below (or try to) the vocal. But Ry Cooder, Yank Rachell, have demonstrated that you can conquer the register and pull things off, especially if you are able to keep a solid rhythmic groove going. If you're gonna mess with Bert Jansch's "Angi", it's better to do it on a mandola.
I don't particularly think that I've done anything really radical or revolutionary on the mando; I've just incorporated a lot of vocabulary and techniques in usage by other instruments and put them onto a mando and made them sound like they belonged there. But then again...I really should have been a guitarist and fiddle player. Oh well, no use cryin' over spilt beer.
(Take a listen to some of the Soundcloud tracks if you think I'm just blowing smoke.) Or do a search in the Cafe search window with my 'name and topic' cause I've commented on this stuff for 20+ years.
Niles H.
Mandocrucian tracks on SoundCloud
CoMando Guest of the Week 2003 interview of Niles
"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so!." - Randy Newman ("It's A Jungle Out There")
Remove 4 strings and voila... except this is a mandola...
Eastman MD315 Mandolin
Not mandolin, but my 10 string mandola, octave mandolin and 10 string mandocello all have wide enough fretboards and string spacing to finerpick. And I do flat pick/cross pick and finger pick them all, using bare fingers. I never liked the sound or feel of metal finger picks and I work with my hands too much to cultivate luxurious classical finger nails.
Here are two of Toomas Rannu's most recent posts:
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
I started playing my own form of fingerstyle on guitar as a teenager, and it's been the most comfortable and expressive way for me to play anything with frets ever since. It's not that hard on mandolin after a little practice. It just comes naturally to me, and I prefer the subtlety it allows me to bring out. I started on violin so maybe using the fingertips for pizzicato made it seem natural.
After fingerpicking guitar for so long, I just couldn't get used to flatpicking my mando. Hopelessly awkward. So I finally gave up and put on my fingerpicks. (Bare-fingered on mando is just about impossible for me.)
The finger picks work fine, but I felt I needed to come here and confess my sin. One of the folks here said Wayne Henderson plays mando with fingerpicks (see video above), which was all the vindication I needed.
Last edited by Charlie Bernstein; Sep-06-2022 at 4:02pm.
Gibson A-Junior snakehead (Keep on pluckin'!)
Without claiming to be good at it, I'll tell you what I've learned: It's a lot easier than flatpicking! For this boy, anyhow.
One advantage: You don't have to do the flatpicker's up-and-down thing. I'm left-handed. My right hand is too stupid for that. With finger picks, the thumb always goes down and the fingers always go up. Simple, and especially handy for tremolo.
Folks here are always curious about picks, so: I use the same picks for flattop, dobro, and mando: brass Acri finger picks and delrin Fred Kelly thumbpicks. They're comfortable, they're loud, and they stay on.
Gibson A-Junior snakehead (Keep on pluckin'!)
I have four & eight string electric mandolins and one of the Airline mandolas too but the Zenkl being a hollowbody seems like it would have a unique tone to the others. Converting an acoustic is a possibility but it'll be a good while before I have time to consider it.
2020 Northfield Big Mon
2016 Skip Kelley A5
2011 Weber Gallatin A20
2021 Northfield Flattop Octave Mandolin
2019 Pono Flattop Octave
Richard Beard Celtic Flattop
And a few electrics
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. - Dennis Miller
Furthering Mandolin Consciousness
Finders Keepers, my duo with the astoundingly talented and versatile Patti Rothberg. Our EP is finally done, and available! PM me, while they last!
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