"Willin"

After seeing Little Feat at the folk fest last summer, I took their song Willin' to the acoustic jams. It's a great song, and got a very good reception from the folks at the jam. (The classic live version from Waiting for Columbus is here.)

I learned the song by searching for the chords, which are easily found, here. This is correct, and is perfectly fine for playing along, or in an acoustic jam. But it's not how they're actually playing the song. All these chords are first position (i.e., open chords, at the bottom of the fretboard.) If you listen, you can tell that the acoustic guitar chords are being played high on the fretboard - and having seen them play it twice in the past year, I can confirm that Paul Barrere starts high on the fretboard and works his way down.

Last night I stumbled across a YouTube lesson that explains it (well, maybe not exactly "stumbled" - Privettricker is simply amazing, and I'm subscribed to his channel and look at his uploads with great interest.) Here's his lesson on Willin'. Very easy, very cool.

Mandolin

I was certain I've blogged before about the mandolin, but I see to my surprise that I haven't. The only thing I've written is the following on my "Gear" page:

Ibanez entry-level A-shape mandolin.  So far it's been a lot of fun to play, but I know that if I ever play it more seriously that I'll want to upgrade.  But most of my attention is on guitar at the moment.

I bought my mandolin from an aikido friend a few years ago. He had bought it to see if he liked it, found that he did, and had upgraded to a nicer instrument. I had the same thought - get a cheap one to play around with and see if it's fun.

It is fun - a lot of fun. I played it some when I first got it, then only played it intermittently for a while. But now I'm playing it again regularly. And as I suspected, that means I'd really like to upgrade to a little higher-quality mandolin.

I know what I'd like - but more on that if it happens. The first thing is to come up with the money for it. I've decided that three electric guitars is more than I really need. Even though I like and play them all (but not all at the same time, as ladies under my roof are fond of saying), I would rather have two electric guitars and one nice mandolin. So two of my electrics are now on Craigslist - whichever one sells first, I'll keep the other.

Here's the kind of song that's fun, and not too hard to play, on the mandolin: Soldier's Joy.

Another Jam and Taking a Lead

The other Saturday night, Darling Wife and I were invited to a small acoustic jam hosted by one of our friends from the Downingtown meetup. We had a great time - and the level of musicianship was a big step up from meetups. It was assumed that everyone had a good feel for basic song structure, and would be able to follow along with whatever was going on. It sometimes felt like bring thrown into the deep end, but I kept up fairly well, and it was a lot of fun to be challenged.

One thing I realized afterwards is that I'm now pretty comfortable taking a lead for 8 or 16 bars. There's usually someone leading the song, and he'll nod at someone to take the next section. When I started playing at jams (2+ years ago), that made me break out into a sweat, because I simply didn't know how to do it and didn't want to embarrass myself.

Now I'm happy when I get the nod - not because I'm making any jaws drop with my sizzling leads (I'm definitely *not*) - but just that I can do it at all. All I need to know is what key we're in, and I can do something. The only issue I sometimes still have is the question of major/minor. I'll know, for example, that we're in the key of D - but are we in D-major or D-minor? It's usually obvious - but occasionally it's not. I still feel very much like a beginner - but it feels good to realize that I can now do something that I couldn't before.

The other thing I realized (at least for the group I was playing with) is that if I'm going to play with groups like that, I should be more familiar with some of the folk standards. There were a number of Bob Dylan and John Prine songs called for, and neither are hard to play, but I didn't know them. I've been listening to and playing some John Prine, and he's fun. Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Paradise
• Spanish Pipedream