THIS CAN BE A BIG OBSTACLE, especially for beginners. You can be given all the usual advice about not playing a tune fast until you can play it accurately at a slower pace. And about adopting correct playing techniques, especially position of the picking hand/fingers, practising with a metronome and so on; but it can be very frustrating to get to a session and find that everyone is playing too fast for you. OK, in some circumstances you might expect the others to give you a chance and slow things down, but the fact remains that in the long term you want to be able to jump in there and burn it up with the rest of them!

My own experience has been that it takes quite a number of years and a lot of practice to be able to play at speed. It's a physical as well as a mental skill, and you need to train in the same way as an athlete, by pushing back the boundaries gradually and NOT overstraining your muscles. I believe it was Don Stover who said that bluegrass picking involved controlled power. The problem is that absolute beginners don't (yet) have either the control or the power. Moreover, as in any other activity in life, some people start with in-built advantages. We're all different, so don't be put off by the genius who picks up speed very quickly, or who seems to learn faster than you.

I started playing the mandolin ridiculously late, at the age of 32, and it took me 5 years to be able to get up to Foggy Mountain Breakdown or Rawhide speed with any sort of power and control. I had previously played banjo for a number of years and never achieved the real top speeds. To cut short a very long story, I reckoned that I had a better chance of gaining speed by using my whole hand/wrist than by playing a finger-style instrument.

You can concentrate on speed by making things easier for the left hand. Guitar and mandolin soloists have a harder job here than banjo players, who can roll away, using combinations of open strings and left hand positions. A good model for mandolin players is Dean Webb, of The Dillards, who often uses minimal left hand fingering and a lot of open string notes, but really pushes it with the right hand. His playing is well worth attention - I learned a lot from his breaks to Dixie Breakdown, on The Dillards Live... Almost!!! LP, which is played at top speed (crotchet d = 168). You can concentrate on getting up speed with the right hand and just touch in the notes with the left hand as required.

Much of Bill Monroe's playing was less notey than that of more modern bluegrass mandolin players (Sam Bush, Doyle Lawson, Jimmy Gaudreau, et. al.), but his power was second to none. Butch Baldassari (who is running the mandolin workshops for the upcoming Sore Fingers Week) has stated quite specifically that "if you want to play a power break, you should cut back on the notes and play like Bill". He himself consciously does this, and has changed his playing in this respect over the years. I have a tape of him explaining this point and demonstrating it - if there's anyone out there who would like a copy, please let me know.

Playing an instrument is a voyage of discovery. You don't know what you're going to be able to achieve until you try. No one, least of all a teacher, can promise you that within, say, two years you'll be able to play such and such. It's a matter of self-motivation and how much you enjoy the music, to keep you practising! Regular practice, at least an hour every day, is vital. All I can say is, keep at it, and you'll probably surprise yourself by how much you manage to achieve in the end. And, as Peter Wernick remarked in his Bluegrass Banjo manual, you can manage without an awful lot of television every day while you practise!

John Baldry, Crawley, Sussex

Updated 23rd Jan 1999