Chords for Mandolin Pick Technique- Crosspicking & Syncopation

[Bm] _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _ _
[Em] _ _ [E] _ _ [G] _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _ _
[Em] _ _ [E] _ _ [G] _ _ _ [A] _
[F#] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ _ _
_ _ [A] _ _ _ [N] Howdy, welcome to BanjoBenClark.com.
This is your favorite online place to come to learn how to play banjo, guitar, and this
week is mandolin, okay?
Through hard drive crashes and all.
I had that happen to me today, but I'm still here with you.
I'm faithful and putting up these videos each and every week for my Gold Pick members at BanjoBenClark.com.
I hope that you like that little piece I just played on the mandolin.
That's the intro lick to a great Rhonda Vincent song called I've Forgotten You.
Of course, the point of the song is she didn't forget the guy.
That's kind of the catch.
Anyway, I love that lick, but there's some great technique and theory that goes on behind
playing a lick like that, and that's what we're going to learn today.
We're going to learn how to do some cross pick, drone pick type stuff between different strings.
This is awesome because I built it for absolute beginners, and we're going to start out just
on open strings on two strings learning how to do syncopated pick patterns.
Okay, so we're going to really work on doing our up-down picking, getting [G] those in time,
and then learn how [D] to _
_ [N] _ jump back and forth between strings and then to add frets to make
up beautiful licks like that Rhonda Vincent song.
If you're watching this on YouTube or Facebook, I invite you to go over to the website that
I'm very proud of, BanjoBenClark.com.
I was looking just the other day.
I have almost 300 taps available for you over there for your gold pick members, and a video
that accompanies all of them.
I put one up each and every week, switch out between the instruments.
So I invite you to go over there and check it out.
You can watch the full 20-minute video I have for this lesson as well as download the tab,
both PDF and TEF file formats, so that you can improve your mandolin picking far, far
above and beyond where you are right now.
Let's do it.
Let's dive into this one.
Today is a technique lesson where I want to show you the basic right hand techniques and
patterns that goes into producing a beautiful _ mandolin playing like we heard in that Rhonda
Vincent song that I played for you.
There's a very succinct method, way that I'm going to teach you to do this.
I've got [D] actually seven different patterns that we're going to primarily center around
the middle two strings just so we can get used to it.
[G] Then we're going to spend some time branching out into other strings and then eventually
[D] _ _ [G] _
learning to put frets with it.
[N] This is going to be a great lesson for you mandolin players that want to learn how to
branch out into some of that cross picking stuff.
What's so important with this, we'll just throw up the first measure there and look
at pattern one and two.
What's so important is that through all these exercises, all these patterns, we're going
to keep a steady down up pick stroke.
That may be the hardest thing for you to do.
I have the arrows there beneath it, but it never changes.
The first, third, fifth, and seventh notes of every measure is a down stroke.
If you can let that just sink in, that'd be awesome.
Then the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth note of each one of the measures is an up stroke.
If we were to go play all these on just one string, it would [D] just simply be down, up,
down, up, down, up, down, up for one measure.
[C] The trick in this comes to when we start playing a different string on different little beats
of that measure.
[D] It's easy enough just to play one string, but what happens when you start jumping up? _ _ _
_ _ That's what we're going to learn how to do here to where it becomes second nature. _
This can just build into [Bm] so many licks [D] to where you can learn how to use drone strings
or like that Ronda Vincent song, _ _ learn how to pick out a melody.
For pattern one, the first beat, and these go in order, but the first and the third beat
of the measure, measure one, we're going to play the A string.
[C] That turns out to be the first note and the fifth note out of the eight notes in measure one.
We're going to play one note on the A string, and then we're going to jump down [C#] with an
up stroke and play [D] three D strings in a row. _ _
[G] Just those first four notes [D] together sound like this. _ _
_ We're just going to do that again. _ _ _
_ All of measure one together sound like this. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ Simple enough, huh?
Simple enough, but the important thing is to realize and make sure that you're doing
down, up, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
We're going to be tempted to try to maybe do two downs in a row or two ups in a row.
We don't want to do that, so do it as slow as you need to do to make yourself do down,
up, up, up.
I'm sorry.
Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
I'd have [N] that both there in measure one and measure two, so if you're practicing along
with the teff file, you can have it repeat that and have plenty of time to practice.
Now, if you'll notice in pattern two, what we're going to do is shift that note that
we play the A string with.
We're just going to shift it one half beat forward.
Now instead of the first and fifth notes of the measure in measure three, the A note is
the second and sixth notes of the measure.
What that's going to do is change the pick stroke that contacts the A string.
It's going to sound like this.
[D] Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
Can you do that?
Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
Good.
These can be fairly [N] simple.
Where it's going to get more complicated in the future when we get into more advanced
patterns is when we start making [D] them syncopated where _ _ _ _ _ we don't [N] land on the A string on the
same beats every measure.
That's going to get to be a lot of fun.
In pattern three, we're just going to move that A string forward another note to where it lands.
[A] We play the A string on the third and the seventh note.
[D] _ _ _ _ [Em] _ _ [Gm] _ _
_ _ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _