Lessons

The September 2022 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine featured an article about mandolin player Andrew Collins and his “Isolationist’s Guide” instructional series. For this week’s lesson, Andrew has generously offered an excerpt from one of those lessons. This one is on mandolin backup.

In this video Dan Miller wraps up the eight part series on learning how to improvise on songs that you’ve never heard before and discusses integrating this approach to improvisation with a couple of other approaches as outlined in earlier videos.

In this video Tim May demonstrates how to utilize the various scales, in an improvisational context, that have been presented in the past few videos in this series-the major scale, the major pentatonic scale, the major blues scale, the minor pentatonic scale, and the minor blues scale.

In this video Tim May and Dan Miller talk about the use of the chromatic, minor pentatonic, and blues scales while improvising on songs that you have never heard before.

In this video Dan Miller continues with his series on learning how to improvise on songs that you’ve never heard before. In this video he explains the notes that make up the major blues scale and demonstrates how to use this scale when improvising.

In this video Tim May and Dan Miller explain the next part of learning how to improvise by continuing with the concept of chord tone targeting. In this segment they talk about targeting the 3rd and 5th scale degrees that make up the chord tones in a I, IV, V progression in the key of…