I know, I know. You might be saying to yourself, “Open strings up the neck!? That just means floating!” You’re not wrong, however I did avoid that word when I titled this article because ‘floating’ isn’t an agreed upon term in the flatpicking community. Some folks still call these licks ‘open string licks’ as opposed to ‘floating licks’. Even more confusing is the idea that some pickers might confuse this ‘open string floating’ with the way some people describe an unanchored pick grip as a ‘floating right hand’.
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I play jazz piano, bluegrass mandolin and other things in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m a self proclaimed music nerd and recently found myself in a unique position due to my background in both bluegrass and jazz. I run a periodic newsletter of weird, obscure and interesting music called The Orphic. Like many productive members of society, I work a desk job to finance my unhealthy interest in music. The following is a rewrite of a response I made on the r/jazz subreddit about the relationship between improvisation…
Lyman Lipke here once again. Last couple times I was here, we took a look at some chords. I’ve been putting off talking about single note lines, but if you’ve taken a good look at my previous posts on chords (or at the very least, pretended to), we can look at a few lines. Our study of chords will give us a deeper understanding of how these single note lines relate to the chord-sound we’re trying to play over.
I want to address a concept in jazz called “making the changes”. We’re trying to define what’s going on in the harmony through our single note lines.
I met Maddie Witler at IBMA 2018 and she was definitely one of the stand out instrumentalists. She appears multiple times in the IBMA vlogs I posted on YouTube and I knew I had to get her on the website sometime in the future. Lucky for us, her band just released a new album, Smoke & Ashes. So Maddie was nice enough to talk with me about…
This may be banjoist Molly Hazel’s first release as a solo artist but she is no stranger to the bluegrass scene. When Molly was only 13, her family created The Pearce Family Bluegrass Band and toured the United States; self-releasing Not For Sale in 2004, Guilty in 2006, and Home in 2012.
You know me from YouTube right? I’m a bluegrass guy. What am I doing writing about electric country licks? Well my bluegrass friends recently got together and decided to start a honky-tonk band. That meant I was going to be getting my tele out of the case and I needed to know some more country language. So I got online and I started poking around but like always, the good information I needed was behind a pay wall.
I’m sure we’ve all seen more than one bluegrass instructional book in our day. You probably have a stack including a Hal Leonard something or other, maybe a book with Tony Rice hugging a guitar and probably some books you’d rather forget. Sadly these books probably don’t come off the shelf very often. Maybe they’re not as useful as you once thought they would be or they’re an example of…
If you’re going to do anything with music you should make sure you’re clear on a few fundamentals. Yes, even bluegrass requires a little music theory. Don’t worry though! This isn’t one of those guitar articles that starts with, “when playing Lydian Dominant over a #11 bVI chord that you’re using for a tri-tone substitution in a circle of fifths chord progression try using the…
We’ve all heard the phrase “stick to the melody!” before. Normally those words are shouted by a bluegrass festival veteran in the direction of a pre-teen Chris Thile play-a-like. But far from a traditional versus progressive dividing line, these comments often come from the same traditionalist that will applaud a completely improvisational Tony Rice break.