The Murphy Method Blog

The excitement in the air was palpable as over three hundred guitar and mandolin students arrived for week 2 at Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamp. Week 2 has an entirely different feel from Week 1, which is much smaller. Little jams spring up under every tree and on the front porch of every building. I taught six delightful students in the mandolin 101 class. This is the very beginning class for people who had never played before. We stuck to the lessons on Beginning Mandolin Volume 1, starting with two-finger chords (G, C, D) and strumming to lots of different songs. Then we did the G scale and by the end of the week we’d made it through “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” “Skip To My Lou,” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” with the chords and strumming to all three. And we changed our strings–all eight of them! Changing strings can be very intimidating to beginners, but when you’ve done it at least once, you can see that it’s not that big of a deal.

There are concerts every night of the week at Kamp. I had the fortune to have some great musicians play on my set with me: Kathy Barwick (Dobro), Chris Jones (guitar), David Harvey (mandolin), and Celia Wyckoff (bass).

By the end of the week, everybody’s brains are full to overflowing with new information, and their spirits are full of musical inspiration. We (even the instructors) go home inspired to practice and learn new things and we all hope that we can come back and do it again next year.

Tags: casey, kaufman kamp, mandolin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:49 pm and is filed under By Casey, Camps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.