Holidays and Life Get In the Way (In a good way!)

Still playing, not a lot of time though!

Why?

My wife and I had a baby boy the other day. Maybe someday someone I can teach the blues.

More posts are coming....

Want Some Great Blues Music?

I'm a lucky guy.... I married a Librarian!

Why lucky? Well, librarys often have large collections of CD's. And being a Memphian, our libraries have large collections of blues music.

So, I had my wife check out a bunch of good music today....

I currently have:

Best of The Blues - Live at "Newport In New York" - BBKing, Muddy Waters, BigBoy Crudup, etc
Blues Breakers - John Mayall with Eric Clapton
The Road We're On - Sonny Landreth
Skin Deep - Buddy Guy
Live In Chicago - Luther Allison

Good stuff, great to listen to and great to learn from!

So get on out to your local library and see what they have. You might be surprised!

Two Great Blues Mandolin Sites

Two more great online resources that I found via Youtube and Google.....

http://www.mandolinblues.de/  This site is by a guy by the name of Rene. His site is very informative, and truly fun to peruse. Also, Rene's Youtube channel is quite good, as he is quite a good player! Very worth time spent.

http://www.mandolinblues.com/ Rich Delgrosso's site. What can I say. Delgrosso is a true scholar of the blues. Most importantly, he is also a scholar of the mandolin blues. Delgrosso spent time with Yank Rachell and others, and I think that adds an element of authenticity to his mandolin blues, but blues comes from the soul and Delgrosso has that in spades. I know Delgrosso comes to Memphis fairly often, so maybe with a little luck, I'll get to meet him someday.

Makin Progress.....

I've spent the past couple of weeks practicing the blues in G. I've found a couple backing tracks on I-Tunes which seem pretty good. I can play along with them and solo over the top, or practice my rythm work.

The backing tracks are in an album called "Blues Jam Tracks". Artist is Matthews and Maz.

The other two things I've been working on are playing both electric and acoustic blues, and finally moving the blues scale around the fretboard. That is one of the beauties of blues played on the mandolin - the scale can be moved up and down the fretboard as well as left and right (higher lower) - I really love that fact!

With that, I guess its nearing time for me to put something up on Youtube of my own doing...... hmmmmm

Happy Birthday To Me!

I'm lucky I have a very understanding wife. She also happens to be a guitarist!
So for my upcoming birthday this year (couple weeks from now), She 'bought' me a new amp.

I've had a Crate 2x10 monster of an amp since the early 90's. Fun amp. Big sound, has chorus and reverb built in. Unfortunately, to get the tone I like when playing the blues, I have to turn the gain up a pretty good bit while leaving the volume bottomed out. Even with that, its loud enough to vibrate the glass in the house - no fun for those not playing the mandolin/guitar!

I started looking for something that I could play my new e-mando on. I wanted something that I could get good sound out of while not turning up insanely loud. I was also interested to try something with a number of effects built in. Final detail was I want something I can carry around easily (vs my 80lbs Crate) and something that could be battery powered.

I looked at the Line6 Spider, Fender Mustang and a few others, but none really knocked me over.

In the end, I selected a Vox DA5 practice amp. More features than I'll use, but most importantly, good tone. Many effects, most of which can be mixed in some fashion, along with 11 tone setups. Inputs for things like my Ipod for jamming along, or a Mic. The amp is battery powered or I can plug it in. Finally, it has an output setting on the rear - .5amp 1.5amp or 5amps. Each setting gives a different power level, while reducing the output volume!

I'm still figuring out exactly how I like it, but so far it is a sharp little package! Even has a bit of 'Brit' to it.

Oh yeah, it was an Ebay purchase used, so I paid approx 30% of new, and it looks absolutely brand new.

Kid Man Blues - Bert Deivert

Kid Man Blues - Great album from Bert Deivert. The album starts with a song called 'Going Down South' and that is what it does. The album dives right into some delta sound and that delta sound permeates the album. The album finishes with 'The Nongharn Blues'- a great acoustic blues track with prodigious mandolin and slide playing that captures a feel of loneliness.

Ok, excuse my poor attempt at putting into words what I think about a great album! Download it on Itunes and see for yourself.

For those of you who have not seen Bert's stuff on Youtube, check out the video below. Great blues mandolin playing!

Bert has also done some nice how-to's on his Youtube channel. I'm going to try them out and see if I can keep up....

She's Got The Devil In Her

GREAT song to play electric mandolin with. Song is in the key of G and so the G blues scale works perfectly with the song. Chord progression is GCD. Easy to follow fun to play along with. Give it a try.



Mandolin Cafe On Demand

Mandolin Cafe On Demand, if you've not tried it yet, you need to.

Simply put, it is a great setup. You see the video you want, buy it and download it.

After years of books and trying to play from them, the MCOD setup is great. If you are a person that learns by watching and doing rather than reading, then it is even better.

So far, I've only downloaded Bluegrass related Mandolin videos, but everyone of them has been great. The play along video for jamming which I got is excellent. Playing along with that video truly made me comfortable enough to head to my local jams.

I'm looking at downloading the Steve James Blues Mandolin 1 video soon.