pancakes3 wrote:dobrojim wrote:Nice
A guy playing a (round neck) dobro.
Haha, i was just going to come in and ask Dobro's opinion on the guy's playing.
Interesting.
I do have one round neck dobro which I play in a similar fashion to this guy, ie without a slide
as if I was playing any other acoustic guitar.
He's pretty solid but he's staying in a fairly modest comfort zone, which is fair when
you're singing at the same time. There is nothing wrong with that. For those who have
never attempted it, playing and singing simultaneously is not as easy as it might seem,
especially if you're trying to riff between lines of the song. He sings with passion which
is a great first step. I liked him.
I was going to post a link to my last open mic performance.
It was blocked for some reason I don't understand.
I did a couple songs solo playing my round neck.
Then I backed up a friend playing square neck.
In case you don't understand the distinction, a round
neck is played like a regular guitar with or without a slide.
The string action is low on a round neck, like a regular guitar.
A square neck is played lap style with a slide.
The body (top) of the guitar is pointed upwards and
the string action is much higher. You do NOT
push the strings down to the neck. The frets on
the neck are visual landmarks to guide you in your
intonation. A square neck has a very vocal quality to
it in a way that is analogous to a violin. You are not
restricted to the discreet notes like a piano or keyboard
but have access to the full range of tones between the
normal scale tones. This can be used to great effect or
for beginners or folks that don't have a good sense of pitch,
can sound awful. In the song She's Better than Me (23 minutes in),
they zoom in one my playing you can see exactly what I was
talking about above.
Here is a youtube of me playing with my main guy Rick Landers
at the Washington Folk Fest a few months ago. I'm completely
oblivious to my mouth doing what it's doing while I'm playing.
SMH at that.
In this video the dobro I play is in open G tuning which means
if I simply strum across the string I will play a G chord although
in this video I'm using a capo to raise the G tuning to what has
become B flat for Working Overtime.
This is Jerry Douglas playing with Tommy Emmanuel. Douglas is widely
regarded as the preeminent dobro player in the world. He's won a eff-ton
of grammies and played with a very impressive list of performers,
many of who's names you would absolutely recognize. From his career
of many decades as a session player in Nashville, he has an uncanny
understanding of how to add to a song, sometimes with an absolute
minimum of notes.
Here Jerry is playing with Derek Trucks. In this vid you can see the difference
between sq neck and round neck. They have different tones due to the
way the strings are connected to the cone inside the body of the guitar.
FWIW, Jerry is a super nice down to earth guy and widely considered
one of the finest musicians in the world (by Alison Krauss for one).