Product Description

Chris Thile, mandolin virtuoso for the hit band Nickel Creek, shares his own successful formula for developing right- and left-hand dexterity, improving speed and accuracy, and playing with heightened musicality. Includes numerous tunes and exercises that will make a big difference in your playing. As a bonus, you'll hear astonishing performances of Chris' original tunes "When Mandolins Dream" and "Raining at Sunset." Includes music and tab. 85 minutes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34731 in DVD
• Brand: Homespun
• Model: 641545
• Released on: 2002-06-01
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Features

• Learn:
• "Ode to a Butterfly"
• "Hop the Fence"
• "Red Haired Boy"
• "Swallowtail Jig"

Customer Reviews

Chris is amazing
As another review mentioned, this is an intermediate to advanced DVD. But that's ok, as our skills develop so should our teaching materials.

After some basic information on how to hold the pick and how to keep the right wrist loose while picking Chris jumps right into a basic tune, "Red Haired Boy" which he uses to demonstrate several techniques throughout the DVD. He covers scale positions, arppegios, position shifting, right hand technique, and left hand technique. You'll learn several songs while you're working on these new techniques like "Red Haired Boy", "Ode to a Butterfly" (The opening song to Nickle Creek's first album) and others.

On the DVD version there's a nice index that shows exactly what he's working on in each of the 42 segments. However, you can only jump to the start of a section which may have 5 or 6 segments in it. But it's still pretty easy to navigate to the segment you want to study. Also, the smaller segments make it easy to "rewind" one segment to study the last 2 or 3 minutes again.

If you play mandolin this will probably become one of the "must haves" of study materials.

Amazing
Firstly, I'm a huge Chris Thile fan, so just sitting back and watching this is a great experience.
Anyway, most would say that this is an intermediate video, as he takes you through some tough stuff early on. But he does start at the beginning ("this is how you hold the pick").
As far as I know this is the only mandolin video on DVD, so that's a big plus too.
A "must have" for anyone learning mandolin at any level.

Chop Builder
This is not for beginners. And there is essentially no musical theory offered here, just a series of exercises to build right and left hand muscle memory. The scales introduced in this video are very valuable (and exhausting!). When going through the arpeggio section, you can see how his mastery of these exercises contributed to the original composition performed at the beginning of the DVD. This video comes with tablature that will get you on the same page as Chris for the most part, however, viewers will have to devote a lot of time to learning these tunes prior to "playing along". Definitely a better purchase than the Ronnie McCoury DVD.