Greetings from band camp! I've spent the past two weeks teaching at music camps in Washington and British Columbia, and it's been a lot of fun meeting aspiring resonator guitar players and jamming with students and teachers alike. For those of you thinking of going to a music camp, I'll be reporting on these workshops in detail in a future article. I recently spent a week at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop near Seattle, which was an absolute blast. My students had mostly come from guitar backgrounds, and reminded me of when I was learning Dobro® after playing guitar for several years. I thought it might be a topic worth discussing.

Benefits of a Guitar Background
Many aspiring Dobro® players come from a fingerpicking guitar background. This experience can give you certain advantages when trying to learn the Dobro®. For one, you're probably familiar with fingerpicks, so using them on the Dobro® won't be a problem. Also, your familiarity with chords and typical chord progressions will come in handy. And if you haven't noticed yet, the 2nd (B), 3rd (G), and 4th (D) strings are tuned the same on guitar and Dobro®. That means that any scales or chord shapes you've learned on those strings on the guitar can be readily adapted to those same strings on the Dobro®.

Travis Picking Habits
While your musicianship is likely to be farther along if you've played guitar, the kinds of alternating-thumb picking patterns associated with Travis picking are a hard habit to break-you might notice that none of the arrangements from my last five lessons have incorporated any alternating-thumb patterns. Although a few lap-style players manage to make interesting music using Travis picking, more often than not alternating-thumb habits will limit what you can do on the Dobro®.

Travis picking works great on guitar because you can create an alternating bass line with your thumb while simultaneously fretting melody notes with your fingers. You can go from chord shape to chord shape and still have at least one free finger to fret notes that aren't in the chord. Excellent and very intricate music can be made this way on a "round-neck" guitar that's intended to be fretted with the fingers.

Limited access to melody notes and predictable up-and-down chord movement when Travis picking a Dobro®
While alternating thumb patterns are great on guitar, with lap-style Dobro® you only have a slide for "fretting" the notes. This means that unless you're working out of the open position (playing alternating bass notes on open strings and fretting other notes with your bar), you're limited to the bass and melody notes along the same fret. For example, on Dobro® if you wanted to get an alternating bass line over a B chord, you'd put the bar on the 4th fret and play the 6th and 4th strings with your thumb. So, what are your choices for melody notes? You're limited to the other notes along the 4th fret (B, D# and F#) or the open strings.

Travis-picking over chord changes on the Dobro® can get monotonous.
Using the same example in the Key of B, let's say you want to go to the D# chord-you have to go up the fretboard with the bar to have the right bass notes available for your thumb, but your bass notes and melody notes all go up the neck together to the 8th fret. What about the F# chord? Go up the fretboard even more. So the typical Travis-picked Dobro® sound goes up for a chord change (to the IV chord), back down to the original (I) chord, back up even higher for the V chord, etc. The sound of alternating bass notes with the same old chord tones for a melody, and the incessant up and down movement of chord changes, gets old pretty fast.

Dobros don't have to play chords all the time.
Another related concept is that guitar players often want to treat the Dobro® as a chord instrument, when really it's more often used as a melody instrument. In a band or jam setting-especially if there's already a guitar, mandolin, and bass identifying the chords and changes-playing all the way through a song on Dobro® probably won't help the overall sound.

Rolls will break the Travis-picking habit.
For these reasons and more, I recommend staying away from alternating-thumb patterns until you've mastered some resonator-specific picking techniques. Eventually, you'll be able to go back and make some good Dobro® sounds with Travis picking, but if it's the basis of your style, it's probably a crutch at best or ball and chain at worst!

For the past few months we've been looking at rolls for bluegrass resonator guitar, incorporating them into mid-tempo arrangements of "Red River Valley" and "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." If you're coming from a guitar background, the picking-related ideas may have been new, and may have conflicted with the picking style you learned on guitar. Remember, practicing rolls is the best way to retrain your picking hand and break the alternating-thumb habit.

Tune for September: "Back to the Pasture"
For the intermediate and advanced players out there, I thought I'd give you something that uses rolls in a hard-driving bluegrass setting. Here's a tab arrangement of one of my original up-tempo bluegrass tunes called "Back to the Pasture." A free mp3 is included with this month's lesson. I hope you have fun with this arrangement, and I'll be back next month with a report about the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and the British Columbia Bluegrass Workshop.

Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, Ivan Rosenberg has released 4 acclaimed CDs of mostly-original instrumentals plusan instructional DVD. He has toured with Chris Stuart & Backcountry, Hit & Run, The Breakmen, and Mighty Squirrel and has recorded with Chad Manning, Jake Schepps, Julie Elkins & David Thompson, Ben Winship, and Mike Grigoni among others. His original music has appeared in several film and television scores including Kangaroo Jack, Deadwood, The Daily Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Bluegrass Unlimited described Ivan as "one of the more prolific masters of the resonator guitar," and in his Banjo Newsletter review, Donald Nitchie wrote that Ivan's Clawhammer and Dobro® CD was one of the best instrumental recordings of the year. A new CD from Ivan and resonator guitar whiz Billy Cardine (with members of Billy's band, The Biscuit Burners) will be released in the summer of 2007.

Known for his systematic and enjoyable approach to teaching, Ivan has instructed at the British Columbia Bluegrass Workshop (BCBW) in Canada, the California Bluegrass Association Music Camp in Grass Valley, and the Sore Fingers Week bluegrass workshop in the UK. 2007 workshops include the BCBW-for which Ivan is also the new program director-and The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. Ivan teaches resonator guitar and clawhammer banjo in both private and group lessons in the Bay Area.

To learn more about Ivan Rosenberg and his music please visit his official website: www.ivanrosenberg.com and www.myspace.com/ivanrosenberg.