Messages posted by: petere

I did a similar thing. I bought a cheap chinese bass (Stentor) for just under 600 UK, then after a few months got a better bridge and strings put on it. Now Ive got a decent enough instrument to tote round to sessions/gigs, and I dont have to worry too much when it gets the inevitable scrapes and chips.

Try accesing Bluegrass College from here

Hi HeldvomFeld - if you decide to write down the fingering, please send it in to us - we may be able to post it as a suggested fingering.

Regards,
Peter
Bluegrass College Administrator

Each lesson is per instrument, so if you want the same lesson for two different instruments you have to buy two separate lessons - so its 18.92 (i.e. 2 times 9.99)

Thanks to all of you who have posted questions asking what is happening with the site, or have sent us emails. we have posted a news item today explaining where we are and what is going to be happening with regard to the lessons - this will alos be sent out to all members as an email in the next couple of days.

The site is going to remain very much alive !

If you have any specific concerns that are not answered in the news item, please feel free to get in touch with us using the 'Contact Us' page.

Bluegrass College Administration

Yes we are still alive!

We are currently reviewing our plans for the rest of this year, and will be posting some news items after Easter to let you all know whats happening.

Regards,
Bluegrass College Administration

If you want to change the speed of the lessons without changing the pitch, try using a free player called Audacity. THere is a Bluegrass College Help page available at http://www.bluegrasscollege.org:8080/Bluegrass/help/displayhelp.jsp?topic=audacity which gives more details on how to do this (and also gives a link to the Audacity download page).

Audacity can also be used to loop sections of the track if you want to practice that way.

Thats a really good idea Rick. We are looking at the possiblity of offering some beginner lessons on the various instruments, and will bear these suggestions in mind.

Peter
Bluegrass College Admininstrator

We would like to apologise to everyone for the video missing from the last two lessons that we have posted. We are having problems with the footage that we shot when the lessons were recorded - but we will eventually be able to get this up on the site.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone for being so patient !

Bluegrass College Administration

I've recently heard the same thing advised if you find it hard to memorise tab - start at the end and work backwards. I havent tried it myself yet, but I'm going to give it a go!

We don't have the tab for 'Long Haired Country Boy' in the the library at the moment - but we are always keen to get new suggestions so we will add this to the list of possible future tunes.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Bluegrass College Administrator

This is what Matt Flinner has to say on the subject :

"I play a Gilchrist Model 5, 1993.

As far as the Collings vs. Weber, they both seem to me to be consistently very good. I don't think you can go wrong. If it were up to me, I'd pick the Collings because I've liked their tone a little better, but that's subjective. Either one is going to be a really fine mandolin."

It might be worth having a go with Audacity simply because it is free! I know the documentation is sparse (to say the least), but the basics are fairly easy and there is loads of stuff on the internet about it. For instance try Googling 'using audacity'.

I found this link which you might find useful

http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

Peter

Sorry for the delay in getting the next lesson up. We have been waiting for some tab to come back from the transcribers and didnt want to put the lesson up until everything was ready.

We are hoping that the next lesson, which will be Forked Deer, will be available this Wednesday or Thursday.

Peter

Some of you may have noticed that we haven't put a new lesson up on the site for a couple of months. Unfortunatly it has proved impossible to coordinate the schedules of the instructors we have chosen. The first available opportunity we now have is late July, so the next new lesson will go up in mid August; before that we will be adding the much asked for second part of the Theory Lesson.

Despite the delay we will be posting all the lessons we originally planned, which means that from August they will be coming thick and fast!

Thank you for your continued support

Andy, Brian, Ian and Peter