The things we worked on have stayed with me - technical things like how to hold the pick, and music theory things like why you memorize and practice different scales (surprisingly, it turns out they're not just something that music teachers use to torture students, they're the backbone of soloing and improvisation.) The knowledge of pentatonic scales has improved my guitar, bass, and mandolin playing a lot.
I mentioned in my last post that the pendulum of my attention is swinging back from the mandolin (which has been my primary focus for the past year or so) back to the guitar. I still love the mandolin and play it every day. But there's a new Martin in the house, I just can't keep my hands off of it.
I mentioned holding the pick. I'd never known the right way to hold it, so I'd been doing it wrong for my entire life. But changing it felt *way* too awkward, and I figured I never would. When I started mandolin, I did it the right way, as I was starting from scratch and had no bad habits to break. After a year of intensive practice, that's now the only way that feels natural. So I sat down with the Martin and started going up and down the scale while holding the pick the right way - and to my complete shock, I went quickly and cleanly (relative to anything I'd ever been able to do before) up and down the fretboard.
Holy smokes, what a pleasant surprise. My mandolin practicing had also paid off on the guitar. This gives me a string desire to improve technically, both in flatpicking and fingerpicking. I've liked the online mandolin lessons I've been taking through ArtistWorks, so I signed up for three months of the flatpicking course, taught by Bryan Sutton, who apparently is a big name in bluegrass guitar. Details soon on how it's going.
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