Andrew Collins and the Isolationist’s Guide To Mandolin
Prior to the COVID lockdown, Canadian mandolin player Andrew Collins had spent the majority of his time performing live, recording and producing (audio and video). Other than teaching at music camps (Kaufman Kamp, Old School Bluegrass Camp, Nimble Fingers, and others), he was not doing a lot of private teaching due to his other commitments. Since the pandemic put a damper on the performing and camp teaching, he had extra time on his hands and, like many other performers, turned to the internet. He said, “When everything locked down, all these musicians started doing these Facebook live concerts. That wasn’t attractive to me because I’m not a solo act. All of my music has been with bands. But I had the idea of doing a ‘festival style’ workshop series where I’d get three mandolinist guests to join me and we’d each take turns and play two tunes each and then answer questions. Mandolin enthusiasts who were watching would have a chance to ask questions and we’d all have conversations about the answers.”
The first workshop Andrew organized featured Andrew, Joe Walsh, David Benedict, and Adrian Gross. Andrew said, “It was a way to try and do something to keep busy during the lockdowns. In the mandolin community, the first one was such a success that I continued to do a bunch of them.” With each workshop, Andrew focused on a different style of mandolin playing (bluegrass, Celtic, old-time, jazz, etc.). He said, “The highlight of all of them was called ‘The Isolationist’s Guide to New Acoustic Music’ and included myself with David Grisman, Jacob Jolliff and Matt Flinner. That was really exciting.” Andrew produced a total of eight or nine of these workshops. Attendees tuned in live and paid via a donation. After the initial airing of these live workshops, they were no longer offered for viewing.
As the pandemic continued, Andrew was broadcasting one of these workshop roughly every other week. After the success of the group “festival style” workshops, Andrew then decided that he would try to produce a two-hour instructional workshop on his own. He started with “The Isolationist’s Guide to Improvisation.” The attendance and support that this lesson received encouraged him to produce others. Over the course of the last year and a half he has produced seventeen downloadable workshops that include a variety of topics, such as playing with speed, rhythm, pentatonics, harmony, playing in minor keys, playing up the neck, playing backup, improvisation II, home recording, modern Monroe, and more (all still available for download at Andrew’s website: andrewcollinstrio.com). Each of the lessons are roughly two-hours long and are accompanied with tablature.
Andrew’s Teaching
Andrew is a talented and articulate teacher who thoroughly knows his subject. His lessons are well thought out and delivered such that it feels as though you are sitting across from him in his living room for a private one-on-one lesson. Andrew said, “What you get in these lessons is actually a lot more than you would get in a private mandolin lesson for the fraction of the price.”
Regarding his approach to mandolin instruction—especially in the group camp setting—Andrew said, “My approach, in general, is that I’m interested in teaching people how to learn—which is really an art form unto itself. I tend not to teach tunes. We really don’t spend class time learning repertoire. If we are going to work on rhythm playing, I like to teach how to practice putting your fingers into position…how do you acquire that muscle memory? We will work on how to build the progression from the simple chop to adding other elements like different pick strokes to fill it out. So, I like to break down and analyze what you are doing so that the student can learn to problem solve the issues that everyone has.”
When asked what kind of material he prepares when getting ready to teach at a camp, Andrew said, “We will always do a class on right hand and left hand technique where we will talk about things like the pick grip. I do not want to teach them how I hold the pick. I want to teach people how to solve problems like the pick turning in their fingers. If they are having that problem, how do they mitigate that? What are different ways to try to relax the hand so that I don’t have unnecessary muscles engaged that are making it harder to pick. These kinds of things.”
Andrew’s approach to teaching is drawn from his own learning experiences. He said, “One of my greatest strengths as a player, I think, is that I’m a pretty good problem solver, so I try to teach problem solving skills for whatever discipline we are working on, so each student can then apply the principals and work at their own pace and level. I find that even advanced players need ideas about how to self-correct and how to practice efficiently. We can all use that.”
Andrew’s Background
If you are a mandolin player and are not familiar with Andrew’s work, he is someone you need to know about. As a kid, growing up in Toronto, he started on the guitar and also played the trumpet, but he wasn’t very focused on music. He said, “I’d learn some stuff on the guitar and then lose interest. It would collect dust and I’d sell the guitar. I repeated that cycle a few times. I liked practicing, but I’d lose interested because I didn’t have an outlet for what I was practicing. When I was around eighteen, a buddy from school, Chris Coole, introduced me to the acoustic genre mostly by way of John Hartford. The first time he played me the David Grisman Quintet, I instantly fell in love with the mandolin. But, I saw how much Chris practiced his clawhammer banjo and I never imagined myself practicing that much. So, it was a good five years before I bought my first mandolin. I was twenty-three and saw the David Grisman Quintet play in Bellingham, Washington. I bought a mandolin the next day. Then, it took over my life. At the time I was living out west in Whistler living a ski bum’s life until the mandolin took over.”
Regarding his learning process, Andrew said, “I wanted to learn the new acoustic stuff, but I started by just learning bluegrass standards. All of my heroes were masters of bluegrass and then went beyond. So, that is where I started. The instructional materials were not really there for mandolin at that time, so I started by lifting stuff off of tapes…you know…stop and rewind for every note. I did take a handful of lessons from John Reischman early on. He gave me some good foundational stuff like proper pick stroke technique. Unfortunately, at that time, I was so green I don’t think that I could really get what he had to offer. But, he gave me great foundational stuff. I was taking it very seriously. I was practicing five to eight hours a day and busking and jamming every night. I learned a lot of repertoire in a short amount of time.”
About six months after beginning to learn to play the mandolin, Andrew moved back to Toronto and found a thriving acoustic music scene. He jumped in with both feet. He said, “There were a lot of young guys in Toronto taking bluegrass music very seriously. I immersed myself into a community of really great musicians and they kind of carried me along on their coattails. Dan Whitely was the mandolin player at the time and I had planned on taking a lesson from him. But, I had already learned all of these twin mandolin parts and we just ended up jamming and becoming really great friends. The jamming continued within this community of guys who were all better than me. But I was really eager and they totally welcomed me in. As gigs started occurring, they started hiring me for gigs. That was my entre into performing. I found myself a community and put myself in the middle of it. I was very lucky that they all took me in.”
After jamming and performing with his friends in Toronto for a couple of years, Andrew decided to attend South Plains College in Levelland, Texas in 1998. He said, “I did the program with Joe Carr, Alan Munde, and Ed Marsh. That got me hungry to learn jazz music. After a year in west Texas, I enrolled in the jazz guitar program at Humber College on mandolin. They didn’t have a mandolin program, so they allowed me to enter the jazz guitar program using an electric five-string mandolin. I just adapted the guitar technique to the mandolin. Surprisingly, it was a logical transition. It was valuable to go through that system and then teach mandolin at bluegrass camps because the same system of teaching applies to bluegrass mandolin. I found that it was useful not only in how I perform music, but in my approach to teaching mandolin.”
While Andrew was a student at Humber College, he also started playing in a couple of bands that would help him become well known internationally. One of those bands was the Creaking Tree String Quartet, the other was the Foggy Hogtown Boys. Creaking Tree’s first recording, The Creaking Trees String Quartet (which was nominated for a Juno Award) came out when he was still attending college. A year or two later, he recorded a duo record with Marc Roy, a fabulous guitar player from Toronto.
I first became aware of Andrew’s mandolin playing when I wrote an article about Brad Keller, the guitar player for Creaking Tree, for Flatpicking Guitar Magazine in 2005. A year later, after meeting Andrew at the IBMA convention, I wrote an article about Marc Roy and reviewed Andrew and Marc’s duo CD. Although I was writing about and reviewing the guitar players on these albums, I loved Andrew’s mandolin work on both recordings. Andrew performed with the Creaking Tree String Quartet for about nine years. They recorded four albums. His stint with the Foggy Hogtown Boys lasted longer, but that band did not tour as regularly. He said, “I was with the Foggy Hogtown Boys for fifteen or sixteen years. We still perform sometimes, but less often now. That band is one hundred percent straight-ahead old school bluegrass. The Creaking Tree String Quartet is instrumental new acoustic music.”
Today Andrew performs with the Andrew Collins Trio. He said, “The Andrew Collins Trio is somewhere in the middle. We are very new acoustic in our instrumental stuff, but we also have a vocal component to our music as well.” The band formed in support of Andrew’s second solo album, Cats and Dogs, released in 2012. Andrew said, “We’ve been together for ten years, but more active for the past eight years. We now have four album releases out with another album in the can, just waiting to be mixed.” Andrew also has released a new solo album titled Love Away The Hate (see the review in the reviews section of this issue).
Andrew Collins is one of those guys that is very fluent in most any style of music on the mandolin. If you want to learn how to better teach yourself to play the mandolin, I highly recommend that you check out Andrew’s “Isolationist’s Guide” series on his website (andrewcollinstrio.com). You will be glad you did!
