At the end of one workshop, a fiddler who was picking up mandolin said, "You're trying to sound like a banjo."
Yes, indeedy.
The banjo frailer's right-hand plays one of two patterns. The basic strum is bump-ti-ty: hit a note with the back of the middle- (or index-) finger for a quarter note, then fill out the next quarter note with a back-hand strum of the chord, capped with the thumb ringing the fifth string drone as it brings the hand back into place. Has to be seen to be believed.
When the he needs another note in those two beats, a single note instead of a chord, a melody note instead of a drone, or even a second eighth note in the first beat, he modifies this slightly, but the rhythm and the basic hand motion only changes slightly.
Defocus your eyes and you can see the big picture -- colors and textures without the distraction of details. De-focus your ears for a banjo tune and you can hear the bump-(a-)ti-ty rhythm all the way through.
Mando's the same thing: down-up-down-up all the way through. Making it sound interesting is about varying emphasis, dropping notes by not hitting a string, and adding thing with your right hand. Adding texture and detail inside the frame.
Like seeing through magician's tricks by watching his hands instead of listening to his patter, when you watch a mandolin player's right hand, you'll see it going up and down like a machine, even when it's not hitting a string.
Ah, but ask a banjo player to play a Galax lick for you.
You'll hear a long, clean arpeggio across the strings, capped by the open fifth string as a note instead of a drone. Sometimes he'll then repeat that note, with his thumb, three or four times in a row without doing anything else with his right hand. Have him put it in context, by playing it in a tune, like Sally Ann, or Shootin' Creek, and it'll jump out at you.
Now all you have to do is copy that on the mandolin.
Instead of chopping across the chord, or playing an arpeggio up-down-up-down, run your pick straight down the strings, sounding each one. Cap it with a fifth note by coming back up on the E string, or even a sixth by picking down on that same E string again.
It's not a chord. Nor is it a set of melody notes, like the arpeggios in Texas Quickstep or Hairlip Suzie. It's an ornament. You're revealing the high note in the lick with a flourish of your cape.
Once you get the feel of it, you can make the last two notes different from one another, or play a three-string arpeggio instead of a four. Shave it down to two strings and suddenly you're playing "look-at-the-bear."
The model, though, is classic, deliberate roll of the Galax lick. When I play it, I'm pretending I'm the banjo players I learned it from: a Ray Chatfield, a Pam Ostergren Brown, or a taller version of Nancy Katz.
