Bluegrass mandolin Archives

June 19, 2022June 19, 2022

4 Good Reasons to Tune Your Soprano Uke in 5ths, and 1 Great One

Fun factoid…. Avocados are not a vegetable. They are a berry. A single seeded berry. So if an avocado ain’t gotta be what it (obviously) is, then a ukulele can be a mandolin! That is to say that a soprano ukulele can be tuned in 5ths, just like a mandolin or violin with some help from a custom-gauge set of strings.

BUT HOW?

Since a ukulele isn’t specifically engineered to be tuned with the tension required for 5^th tuning (E-A-D-G) you absolutely have to get your string gauges perfect to adapt the machine that is your ukulele to a more high-tension tuning. Aguila is one of the companies that makes a custom gauge set of string for 5^th tuning, and they are fairly easy to find. SO please start by restringing your uke. As a note, it really doesn’t work well to tune the 5^th tuning gauges to a standard tuning, so… you hear it coming… maybe you need to get another uke just for this experiment. I have a couple soprano ukes so I was set to go.

BUT WHY? (Here are 4 good reasons and 1 great one)

1: It gives you another voice to layer into your ukulele playing. This sounds nothing like a uke, more punchy like a mandolin, but kinda harsh like plucking a violin with a pick.

2: You will get to explore learning something new. If you don’t know anything about a mandolin, you should grab a chord chart, and maybe some tablature for some old fiddle tunes. Mando lin tablature is written on just four lines, so you wont have any trouble using it for a 5^th tuned ukulele.

3: Very few other musicians, especially folk musicians, take this approach… So that means you aren’t copying ANYONE! That also you can’t do it wrong… In fact, you are the trendsetter. Getting on at the ground floor is pretty cool.

4: It is really fun to be the unique musician in a jam session, and this will a but assure that will be the case. Just before writing this blog is the first time I have tried tuning a uke in 5ths, and I can’t wait to give it a more public premier.

5: You will develop new techniques that inform and influence your playing on other instruments. This could be the best reason of all. I found that when tuned in 5ths, my soprano uke would kind of “wolf note” on any open string when soloing. So I tried to palm mute everything. This ended up sounding pleasantly “pizzicato” (when a violin is being plucked instead of bowed). After doing this I started trying to incorporate the pizzicato effect into playing the mandolin. I have always palm muted the mandolin, but not so much that the notes sounded super plucky. So, my mandolin playing evolved as a result of playing the uke tuned in 5ths.

MOVING FORWARD

If you would like to try this approach, please please please visit your favorite local music store first and pick up a set of ukulele strings designed for 5^th tuning. Shopping local first is the best default strategy anytime! Please support your neighbors.

If you need to shop on the internet your favorite string shop probably has them available, and if you are an Amazon shopper, I have a link below to the strings I bought.

Also, I have a little YouTube of my 5^th-tuned-uke experiment below. If you watch the video please watch through to the very end… I just really like the little cartoon of me on the very end of video – no other reason – just want to share the funny.

https://youtu.be/WADAwqm-bGY

FREE stuff!

I would like to invite you to subscribe to my blog. That way you won’t miss any of my acoustic and traditional music ramblings. When you subscribe to the NekkidMusic.com blog, you get a FREE get started e-guide to learn the 5-string banjo! You will learn the basic blocking and tackling to get you started playing chords, rolls, and fun old tunes on the instrument that launched the ship that Earl sailed upon. (I hear angels singing.) Please subscribe!

Take a leisurely look at my general store where I keep some links to important things that you can buy to help your pickin’. >>> Link to NekkidMusic.com general store <<<

Thanks for stoppin’ by today! Ya’ll come back and we’ll do some pickin’.

May 31, 2020

Creole Cross Mandolin Tuning

My Dad’s friend Baptiste was a fiddling wizard. This feller was old! He remembered when Methuselah had a paper route, and he knew every alternate tuning that was ever sawed across a fiddle. My favorite was what he called the ‘Creole Cross.’

Baptiste would tune the fiddle down to 4th G / 3rd C / 2nd G / 1st C explaining that Cajun and Creole musicians love to play in the keys of C and G. The he would perpetrate a little bowing magic he called “palming the frog.” He would take the frog completely off the bow and he would rock the bow under the fiddle’s back while holding the frog in his palm, and loosely running the hair over the top so he could bow across all the strings at once.

Baptiste said that the “Cajun” just wouldn’t come out of his fiddle until ‘old Scratch’ hopped out of a paper bag (presumably with a rum bottle in it), and taught him ‘the Debbul’s notes’ (drone), to slide into double-stops, and put a distinctive syncopated lope in his bowing rhythm. He said Cajun fiddlers also need to know, that for ‘le bon Dieu’ to redeem ‘ya im-motal soul,’ ya gotta fiddle on the Creole Cross.

I ain’t much of a fiddler (in fact I am painfully awful at it), but from time to time I tune my mandolin in Creole Cross for a tune or two. After all, I am fond of le bon Dieu (the good Lord), so I ain’t a-takin’ any chances!

I invite you to take a lingerin’ listen to Bonaparte’s Retreat played on the mandolin, in what I was taught to be Creole Cross tuning.

FREE STUFF

Take a leisurely look at my general store where I keep some links to important things that you can buy to help your pickin’. >>> Link to NekkidMusic.com general store <<<

Thanks for stoppin’ by today! Ya’ll come back and we’ll do some pickin’.

May 17, 2020May 17, 2020

The Beautiful St. Anne’s Reel

Kierkegaard once said that ‘grits are not a problem that needs to be solved, but the only true Southern way to experience corn that doesn’t get ya drunk.’ He was the father of ‘bubba-level existentialism.’ Not Soren Kierkegaard, the 19^th-century Danish philosopher, but my ol’ pickin’ buddy, fair-to-middlin’ fiddler, and deep thinker, Enis Kierkegaard from Beaufort, SC.

This post is highly ‘bubba-stential.’

I finally came to terms with the mandolin! The mandolin was demanding that she play rough and loud with chopping vamps and lick-based solos in rousing bluegrass songs. And I would be forced into compliance! I had to confront her. I just wasn’t that good at it. The mandolin taunted that perhaps my hands weren’t as nimble as they once were, or maybe my mind was slowing and solo improvisation was out of reach for me. But it was something else… I experienced the mandolin as a beautiful, ancient instrument, the deliverer of the literal siren’s song. Then she said, “so you want to play beautiful melodies on my four courses?” I said that I did. The Mandolin then said, “I will allow fiddle tunes, reels, and waltzes, but that’s as soppy as it gets!” I struck the deal!

I have only given a human name to one instrument in my life, but I regularly give a name to the essence of an instrument. The spirit of the mandolin, to me, is Hannah, the canonical derivation of Anne. Because the mandolin’s essence gave us ‘St Anne’s Reel,’ as a blessing of a lilting melody and an ancient story for our hearts to dwell on.

When I play this great old tune, I daydream about a blind youth in Apt France leading Charlemagne to the hidden entrance of the relics of the grandmother of Jesus, Saint Anne herself. For a good ol’ boy like me, drifting away on an apocryphal quest is something significant enough to write about!

Tracing the origins of old fiddle tunes can be pretty dicey. For St. Anne’s Reel, we started calling the song by that name en masse, when Canadian fiddler Joseph Allard recorded it in the 1930s. But the melody goes back for a couple of centuries before that. Likely a French a-a-b-b dance tune that translated well to an Irish reel… Just like the story of the blessed St. Anne translated well to the Vatican when granting her patronage of grandmothers with wayward grandchildren, miners, and equestrians. (That’s right, The Good Lord’s Memaw watches over the horsey set. I reckon everyone needs a blessing from time to time, even those who are uppity enough to wear jodhpur breeches in public.)

If you share my affection for beautiful old-timey fiddle tunes, please consider St. Anne’s reel as one of those songs that mature along with you over time. Not just a tune you learn so you can jam with your crew, but something that will develop with more and more sophistication year over year. Just like my friend Gene. He retired as a Major in the US Army, a Ranger, and an honest-to-taters warrior. Over time, Gene matured into a right successful Georgia bee farmer and, I wouldn’t say he is a hippie, but he has a ‘deliberately organic spirit’ about him. I just like that feller! He is not afraid to embrace his personal evolution. Such is St. Anne’s Reel. She came to me as a bluegrass reel, then evolved more of an Irish traditional melody, and now she sports some contemporary chord structures. Just like Gene, she is refining with the passing of time.

Below is a link to my video demo of St. Anne’s Reel.

FREE stuff!

Also please take a look at my general store when I keep some links to important things that you can buy to help your pickin’. >>> Link to NekkidMusic.com general store <<<

Thanks for stoppin’ by today! Ya’ll come back and we’ll do some pickin’.