Fixing Bad Advice For Bluegrass Guitarists 

OMG that's awful. I was in a music club for years--for Appalachian dulcimer--and the advice was always "Definitely play if you don't know the tune". The understanding was that you'd only be able to hit a note here and there at first, but you'd hit a few more each time until you could play the tune.

As another Irish session player, I feel moved to expound upon this. In an old-time or bluegrass context, I think this approach is definitely appropriate and generally well received. Both of those styles are going to have more of an opportunity for the musician who doesn't know the song or the tune to grab it. But in an Irish session, typically a tune gets played 3 or so times before moving to another tune entirely. So unless you have very good ears, or unless your attempts at grabbing the tune are very quiet, you are going to really get in the way of the other musicians who know the tune. I received the exact same advice when I started playing Irish (and also ignored it), and I had someone pull me aside after a few sessions of doing this and explain that the etiquette for Irish was different than old-time music, and my attempts to find the melody during the session were not being well received. Don't be this guy! I had to learn this lesson through embarrassing myself. Even backers in my opinion should be hesitant to play unless they really have a good grasp on the tune. I found much more success after I started getting out a tape recorder, learning the tune at home and coming back the next time ready to play it. In bluegrass, you typically are playing chords and taking breaks over vocal melodies, and everyone gets a chance to play, if you screw up when you play your solo, nobody really cares, because the focus is just on one performer at a time. But in Irish, the objective is for everyone to play as tight of a unison as possible, folks fumbling at the tune while the others are playing really does bring down the music. In old-time, the tune gets played maybe 15-20 times, so you will have much more of an opportunity to learn the tune by the time its over. Just my two cents as a guy who came to Irish from old-time and had to really learn how to be mindful about what I did when tunes that I didn't know came up to be played.

"BOOM!" LOL earth shattering😁

For Red Haired Boy there are two six note scales used. Firstly there is the one which has the triad from the Tonic and a minor from a whole step above so in G that would be GBD plus ACE or GABCDE, you can look at this as a G major pentatonic plus a fourth as a passing note. The mixolydian sound of the flat seventh is actually WITHHELD until the chord of the flat seventh (that is F in the key of G) for that part of the melody the six note scale is a G triad plus an F triad, that is GABCDF or the mixolydian scale minus the sixth (E). The chord on the Dominant which is used to connect the b7chord to the tonic (ie F,D7/F#,G) is not reflected in the melody and should be considered a chromatic passing chord which takes us out of the mode but without changing the melodic material (there are not Fsharps in the melody). In fact there are no Fs, natural or sharp, until the B part of the tune where the F note appears supported by an F triad, this is common in the Scottish tradition where the defining note is withheld until the B part of the tune (sometimes in tunes like Flower of Scotland the note is withheld until the final measure making it's appearance super telling ). The soloist had best avoid F till then in his solo. Six note scales are where it is at for mislabelled 'modal' tunes based on Scottish and Irish traditions. Buy a book of traditional fiddle tunes and see how many have only six notes and are in fact NOT modal but bitonal or hexatonic. It's about ninety percent. Kinda laughable that people don't notice these things, they would if there wasn't a fake theory of music talking about modes out there sending everyone off in the wrong direction.

@@davidfreel1451 and one can play great breaks on fiddle tunes without knowing or caring about anything your long winded post said.

@@davidfreel1451 whhhhhyyyyy?

@@paulawhtkr001 Ask your mother.

If you can play basic rhythm and are willing to sing, then learn some songs. Choose the right key for your voice. In every jam that I have ever been to, somebody who sings is always more of a jam hero than any hot lickin' instrumental hotshot. You don't even have to be a good singer - just be smiling. No more fear.

This video is from before I put out the album with the theme song you know on it! This track is an instrumental I wrote called Pencil Pusher, we played it at our last lesson together!

Lessons With Marcel yeah, I know. I thought it was funny we were talking about it and RU-vid recommends this video and it’s the intro LOL