Essential Techniques for Mandolin

Rating:
Summary: Chris is amazing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Chris is amazing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Definately for beginners
Review: Definately for begginers. He also needs mandolin classes, his tecnique is not so good, specially his left hand!

Rating:
Summary: Good DVD - good service
Review: Firstly the DVD is not region specific: it works fine on a European/UK region 2 DVD player and a region 2 PS2 without any problems.

Delivery from the US to the UK was quick - about 8 to 9 days from dispatch to receipt. Excellent service.

The DVD isn't really for *complete* beginners rather the teaching has a more intermediate feel about. Well structured lessons and a nice variety too. You can't really go wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful tutorial
Review: I haven't got much to add to the previous reviews, this DVD is fantastic. I do have one additional piece of information that might help non-US purchasers, though. According to the amazon.com product information, this DVD is region 1 encoded and won't play outside the US and Canada. In fact, I put it into a region 4 only DVD player and it played straight away without my having to alter the region setting, which is definitely set to 4. So I don't think this DVD has any region encoding. At least, not the one they sent me!