Dear mando-friends,
as I was following another thread elsewhere on the Café, I was reminded how strained and choppy chord-playing on the mandolin can sound— and I do NOT mean intentional chop, but, well... that other kind. You know... the strings are awfully close to each other, pressing down 6 - 8 strings is naturally more strenuous than pressing down only one, two-string course, etc. Time and again, as I listen to my practice, I must grudgingly admit that my own chord-playing sounds less than music and more like breaking twigs.
With that in mind, I sat down yesterday afternoon and "composed" —I use the term VERY loosely, and hope that such looseness will be pardoned— a little chordal study for the mandolin, after a violin-study by famed Belgian violinist and pedagogue Charles de Bériot; I titled my spur-of-the-moment critter simply Après de Bériot, as it IS, after all, after HIS etude.
Ever-generous Jim Garber agreed to post it amidst my other tidbits for solo mandolin:
http://www.paperclipdesign.com/vk/
Some obvious disclaimers are due: this is decidedly not "original", less yet "modern" music, nor is it stage-worthy as a performance-piece. The point of the exercise is that, as this is hardly a hard thing to play, one can play it with some degree of comfort, keeping the fingers down, letting the strings ring, and listening carefully as the various voices inside the chords connect. As in any and all music, voice-leading should ALWAYS sound cogent, coherent.
I hope my latest tidbit is a valuable exercise in chopping out the unintentional choppiness.
Enjoy!
Cheers,
Victor
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