This class is all about getting the feel, pulse and flow of Irish music into your mandolin playing. We’ll focus on understanding and developing techniques for playing the many forms of Irish dance music on the mandolin – jigs, reels, slip jigs, hop jigs, polkas, slides, waltzes, etc. We will work on both picking hand and fingering hand techniques, learning to express the distinctive rhythmic forms, to deliver the pulse of the music, while improving tone production and sustain. We’ll highlight some unique things that the mandolin brings to the music. We’ll explore phrasing, ornamentation and variation, always focusing on musicality, learning how to give life and lift to the tunes you learn—how to take them from a series of notes into joyful, gratifying expression in Irish music!
MP3 files of tunes we’ll be working on will be provided well in advance of camp so we can spend class time exploring ways to express the tunes, applying concepts and techniques that we learn in class. We’ll also look at tunes you already know, but feel ‘stuck’ on, perhaps unable to take them beyond the way you learned them, and try to push open a few doors to take your playing to the next level.