Go for it! Just remember, the first 30 years are the toughest and after that I hear it's a piece of cake. haha Seriously, if it calls you, then you will have to do it. Don't let age discourage you - it's all a matter of how badly you want it and that will dictate the time you put into it. I know of many examples of people coming late to some instrument only to really shine on it. Determination goes a long way to gettin' some of that talent that you might think others were born with.
I was playing fiddle before mando, so I essentially play the mando like a fiddle - lotsa two-note chords, same fingerings for everything I would play on fiddle, etc. I'm pretty scatterbrained, so I am into studying lots of instruments and types of music at the same time. Variety is nice! Also, the more I learn the more I find some things related and they can help feed each other. For instance, I play clawhammer banjo and in the last couple of years I have gotten heavy into lap slide style resonators and bottleneck style guitar. And guess what - one of the major tunings for the slide style is closely related to the open G banjo tuning, so that helped give me some bearing right there. The same tuning moves onto the Tele with the low string removed and then you're off into Keith Richards tunes, which almost play themselves. Then I might go off into some James Brown funk on drums or guitar, and then I hear banjo and fiddle great Dan Gellert (in Fiddler magazine) talking about James and his emphasis on stressing the ONE beat and how he does that in old- time to open things up and make them funkier than stressing the 2 and 4 like most folks and so things move around in circles! When I took up banjo, logically it seemed like a crazy idea - I was still taking fiddle lessons and I had returned to college as an adult and I had no time for banjo. But, I was exposed to it and it called me and I met a great banjo teacher and things just lined up perfectly! The fiddle really helped the banjo, as I essentially play the banjo with the left hand the same way I finger the fiddle, just on a larger scale. Old time fiddle and banjo often use altered tunings, and they match up really well on the two instruments, so once I discovered the connection I could immediately play tons of fiddle tunes on the banjo. Let's look at drums - I took up drumset late in life, just because I had always wanted to. Finally got the guts to try it! And so now I play in an Oldies trio just for fun; and what a blast it is! Seems totally unrelated to my old-time music pursuits, right? Well, drums are all about rhythm, of course, and the banjo is largely about rhythm and now I am starting to combine drums and old music, like acoustic blues slide stuff. Getting into playing drums and slide or banjo at the same time! Turns out, that is an old Blues tradition and there is a specialty drumset now made to be entirely played with your feet. Way cool! So, things seem to connect in odd, fun ways. However, I recently saw the one and only banjo player Leroy Troy, and he said worried early in life about doing too many things, and someone warned him of having a split brain if he did that and that he should maybe focus on one thing. Well, it's obviously working for him, whatever he's doing, but my brain is split several ways and that's just the way I am! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Taterbugmando" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
