David Grisman Teaches Mandolin: Style, Technique and Musicanship "Dawg Mandolin" with Other

Rating:
Summary: Excelent and very personal lesson from Grisman
Review: Imagine that you're in a small lesson room at your local music store. You're tuning up your mandolin waiting for your teacher to come in. The door opens and your teacher for today's lesson is David Grisman! That's the feeling I get when listening to and working with these CD's. It truely feels like you're sitting down one on one with the master and he's showing you his stuff.

Sure, it's David teaching you his own tunes, but there's more to it than that. He's also teaching you the reasons why he does what he does. He teaches harmoney leads on songs like "Dawg's Bull" but he also teaches why those harmony leads work and how to write your own.

One of my favorite sections is for the song "Minor Swing" where he discusses chord substitutions. This is just good basic jazz music theory presented in a meaningful way and applied to an actual song rather than just presented as a theory.

That brings up another point. The printed music is just the basics of the songs. When David talks about chord substitutions and so on you'll need to get out your notebook and write down what he's saying on the CD because many times it's not written in the book. But that's another reason why this feels like a private lesson. You'll have to listen, take notes, and practice to get the most out of this series, just like a real lesson.

So get out your instrument, tuner, metronome, notebook, and CD player. You're about to have about 6+ hours of intense mandolin lessons. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: Excelent and very personal lesson from Grisman
Review: Imagine that you're in a small lesson room at your local music store. You're tuning up your mandolin waiting for your teacher to come in. The door opens and your teacher for today's lesson is David Grisman! That's the feeling I get when listening to and working with these CD's. It truely feels like you're sitting down one on one with the master and he's showing you his stuff.

Sure, it's David teaching you his own tunes, but there's more to it than that. He's also teaching you the reasons why he does what he does. He teaches harmoney leads on songs like "Dawg's Bull" but he also teaches why those harmony leads work and how to write your own.

One of my favorite sections is for the song "Minor Swing" where he discusses chord substitutions. This is just good basic jazz music theory presented in a meaningful way and applied to an actual song rather than just presented as a theory.

That brings up another point. The printed music is just the basics of the songs. When David talks about chord substitutions and so on you'll need to get out your notebook and write down what he's saying on the CD because many times it's not written in the book. But that's another reason why this feels like a private lesson. You'll have to listen, take notes, and practice to get the most out of this series, just like a real lesson.

So get out your instrument, tuner, metronome, notebook, and CD player. You're about to have about 6+ hours of intense mandolin lessons. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.