Patreon Q&A #1 - Musical Training (Patreon)

Note: I've decided to upload audio with transcripts so that those who like to read may, and those who prefer to listen have that option. Enjoy!

TRANSCRIPT:

Question 1 comes from Pat Daddona

When did you learn to play guitar? Violin? Mandolin? And Keyboards? And which instrument (only one!) could you not do without?

I started playing violin at the age of nine. Jan Bogikes, a neighbor and family friend who played for the Long Beach Symphony, gave us a little solo concert in the living room one afternoon, where she played both fiddle tunes and classical pieces. I was entranced. I already loved music — you couldn’t stop me from singing and making up harmonies, and by that point I’d made a regular practice of sneaking into my parents’ bedroom to teach myself songs on guitar from my dad’s songbooks, but — Jan’s performance lit me up in a brand new way. The technical skill of it; the dynamics; the drama; and how this giggly, goofy woman I knew became so grounded and so serious when she lifted the instrument to her chin to play. I wanted to be grounded and serious and skilled like that. I wondered whether I had it in me.

Jan offered to loan me one of her spare violins, which I remember being nearly black and very loud, and then hooked me up with a teacher, also named Jan, who just happened to live a block and a half away. I started lessons immediately and I loved the violin intensely. I played that borrowed instrument until my parents finally bought me my own beautiful Eberle violin the Christmas of my seventh grade year. I think that was 1980.

Because I started lessons a few months before the elementary school string program began, I had a little head start over the other kids and was promoted quickly to advanced strings. I attended summer music camps, kept up the lessons through high school (including duo lessons which was really fun), performed with honor orchestras and county-wide youth orchestras, and always belonged to the school orchestra. When I arrived at UC Berkeley, I expected to continue playing, and auditioned for chamber groups, but was told my piece was inappropriate, and furthermore, my bow arm was… how did they put it? … oh yeah. “Terrible.” Chamber groups were not going to happen for me but they did offer me a spot in the symphony. Unfortunately for them, I’d fallen in love with small-ensemble work and wasn’t interested in being part of a sea of sound. Anyway, the offer felt like a consolation prize, and I wasn’t consoled. 

After that audition, I returned to the dorm, put my violin in a closet, and did college. It would be nine years till I pulled it out again to lead the second violins in the small Modesto Junior College Symphony for one semester. 

The following year, I moved to Portland and started playing with Dave Carter. Feeling that I was in over my head, I found a teacher and began studying with the amazing jazz fiddler Hollis Taylor, who taught theory and improvisation and helped me adjust my technique according to whichever genre I was playing.

If we’re talking about which instrument is my go-to, my soulmate, my number one, and an extension of my natural, true voice, it’s violin. But I don’t think I can work without guitar, so that part of the question is tough, Pat.

Guitars were always around. Earliest photo of me with a guitar — I must be three, I’m posing with my auntie’s dreadnought and grinning like a star even though the guitar's bigger than me and my pudgy left hand can barely hold it up.

My dad inspired me to play. My dad had taken private guitar lessons when he was a kid and he was quite skilled on both slide and acoustic guitar. He used to play for us and the neighborhood kids while we lived on Jutewood Street, so — I guess up until about sixth grade. He didn’t teach me guitar but we had songbooks that showed how to make chords, so, as I said before, I’d sneak into his room, pull his guitar from the case and try to work out some of the easier songs on my own. It’s how I came to learn "Solitary Man."

I didn’t take any guitar lessons till I moved to Modesto in my twenties.  My dad was living in Modesto too and had lost interest in his big old Yamaha acoustic, so I borrowed it. Somehow, I found a guy giving lessons in the back of a music shop in the mall — I don’t even know how I found him — but, I took three or four lessons,  learned some Travis picking, and then went back to teaching myself from songbooks and by ear. In the spacious and echo-y master bathroom, I made guitar-vocal cassette recordings of myself singing The Judds, Tanya Tucker, Bellamy Brothers, Colin Ray. I got a Tascam four-track recorder and that’s when I started writing songs and began working in earnest on my technique with my guitar-playing boyfriend, Dave #2, cheering me on. I started checking out singer-songwriter shows in cafes around the Bay Area and I suppose this is the moment when my future path began to unfold before me.

In 1995, after I finally earned my English degree, my auntie invited me to teach ESL in Taiwan for five weeks. I don’t know what inspired me to bring the guitar to Taiwan, but on the day of our closing ceremony, just before we all said goodbye to one another after a long five weeks together, I stood on the auditorium stage and, flanked by half a dozen weeping American teachers, led the school’s entire population of sweet, sentimental teenaged Chinese girls in what must’ve been the most bereft, red-eyed rendition of “That’s What Friends are For” ever performed. 

My solo debut and first international performance, all rolled in to one.

By the time I hooked up with Dave Carter the following year, I had a solid rhythmic foundation and some basic picking patterns under my belt. I didn’t feel stage-ready — with the exception of Taiwan, of course— but it wouldn’t take long. 

I have continued to learn by absorption — Jim Henry has been a great role model in that regard — and also through an unorthodox kind of remembering. There are songs I’ve learned to play by recalling in my mind’s eye the way Dave Carter used to play them. Not just his fingers, but how his whole body moved around the instrument. In mimicking what appears in my memory, I have been able to replicate some of the parts. Like I said, it’s unorthodox, but in our case, maybe not so surprising.

Mandolin. Now here’s the perfect instrument for someone who already has violin and guitar skills, because you pick and strum it like a guitar, right? But it’s tuned like violin, so your left hand already has some scale knowledge in it. Dave Carter bought me a mandolin for our first Christmas together and then, at the Sisters Folk Festival one year, the folks at Breedlove offered me an artist deal on a beautiful burgundy mandolin I’d eventually play on stage with Joan Baez. After Dave’s death, money was tight, I was confused, unsure what from the past I wanted to carry forward. I sold the mandolin. I regret that sale every day and miss that mandolin all the time. But there is a bright spot. My dear fans and friends Donna and Sara (whom I call my folk “aunties”) gifted me a lovely F-style mandolin that I’ve named Mimi after Mimi Fariña, and which I perform with now.

Keyboards — well, again, I’m totally self taught, and I suppose in this case, it really shows. Dave Carter, who gave lessons and was a professional classical player himself, could not stand to hear me plunk away and refused to teach me. That’s how bad it was! On our tours, if I saw that the venue had a house piano, whether or not it was in tune, I used to bang through some Bach Inventions just to drive Dave crazy.  And it always worked.

One thing I can say about all the instruments I play, including my voice: I’ll never run out of things to learn, nor will I ever run out of teachers, and this is what makes music such a beautiful challenge, and such a rewarding ride. Thanks for the question, Pat, I really appreciate it. 

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