"Everybody marvels at the best players,
which is all well and good, but there is a “trick”
to it: it’s balancing out your right hand." -
Jimmy Heffernan
"When learning
dobro from books or videos there's a tendency to skip Chapter
1, 2, and 3, and move right to the fancy licks, without
ever learning how to practice tone, timing, or intonation.
The first few chapters are usually gold! So a lot of my
workshop time goes to revisiting the fundamentals."
- Ivan Rosenberg
"I once asked
Gatemouth Brown when you should start working on having
your own style, and without batting an eye he said, “as
soon as you’ve got the basics down.” Now, what
it means to have “the basics down” is kind of
open ended, and of course one really good way to learn is
to figure out how the musicians you love are making the
sounds you want to be able to make on the instrument. But
how is only half of the equation; the other half
is why. You can never own someone else’s
why, you have to come up with your own. If you
just learn to play like other people, you’ll always
only have half the picture. What do you want to
play? What do you think it should sound like? What’s
your personality, and how is it going to come out
on the instrument? Once you start to get a handle on that,
you’ll have something all your own, and that’s
the bedrock every musician ultimately needs to find."
- David Hamburger
"I find
discussions that revolve around "can you play swing/celtic/bulgarian/jazz/whatever
music on the dobro" amusing because why would there
be any limit on what you can play on an instrument that
so closely recalls the human voice? Is there any kind of
music that can't be sung if you take the time to learn the
rhythmic and harmonic peculiarities of the form?" -
Orville Johnson
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