Cross picking
With
Tom BekenyTom Bekeny demonstrates cross picking on the mandolin - Jesse McReynolds' technique for getting a banjo-style roll with a flatpick.
What's in the course
20 lessons (1h 18m) · 1 free
Lesson transcript
Cross Picking Technique
One thing I briefly want to touch on with you is Jesse McReynolds. I mentioned him in passing because he developed a technique called cross picking and another one called split string. Let me just demonstrate for you the basic cross picking pattern.
What is Cross Picking?
Really, what he's doing with the mandolin here is almost copying a banjo-like roll, a banjo sound of a five-string banjo in a bluegrass band, but doing it with a flat pick.
I can't call out the pick directions and do it at the same time, so you'll have to look at the website where I've diagrammed out what your right hand is doing in a basic cross pick pattern.
Practice Suggestions
- I will provide you with some double stops which we covered, say in the key of G or over the chord of G major.
- You can play that pattern and just get accustomed to the sound and how to produce the sound with your right hand.
It's really something you can just play around with.
Once you get comfortable, you can take maybe a song whose melody you've worked out one way, and if it's not too fast, you can then figure out a cross pick version where you're incorporating the melody notes into this cross pick pattern.
Advanced Techniques
The most developed version of this is Jesse McReynolds. Although he has a basic pattern, he just varies that pattern and breaks out of it, doing all kinds of things.
For now, I think it would be good just to learn the basic pattern.
Demonstration
So again, I'll be playing double stops over a G major chord. But before I do that, let me just play it open for you.
Here is the pattern played one time through.
So then if I place some of these double stops, it sounds like this: G7, G7 (because I'm playing that F note flat at seventh).
20 lessons
1h 18m of structured video lessons
Advanced video features
Slow down, loop a passage, follow along
Mobile, tablet & desktop
Practise wherever you are
100% satisfaction guarantee
30-day money-back guarantee
Meet your guru
Meet your guru
Tom Bekeny is a mandolinist, fiddler and seasoned mandolin teacher who has performed and taught in the U.S. and abroad for over 40 years - so when he breaks down how to play, you are learning from someone who has spent a lifetime both on stage and in the lesson room.
He was the mandolinist in such San Francisco Bay Area bands as Done Gone, Tenbrooks, and an early version of the Grant Street String Band with Laurie Lewis. He has appeared with Peter Rowan, the Rowan Brothers, David Grisman, George Cole, vocalist Lua Hadar, and Jerry Garcia. Tom has played mandolin with the highly acclaimed Kathy Kallick Band for almost 20 years and has held the fiddle spot with California's premiere traditional bluegrass band, High Country, since 1988. He has recorded with many of these groups and was featured in the Summer 2009 issue of Mandolin Magazine.
Tom also plays in the wildly popular trad bluegrass "jam" band, Bangers and Grass, alongside west coast bluegrass luminaries Jim Nunally, Steve Pottier, Bill Evans and Chad Manning.
Beyond bluegrass, Tom plays jazz mandolin with his trio The Missing Man Quartet (MM4), which plays straight-ahead jazz with original arrangements drawing material from the world of jazz and Great American Songbook standards. He released a solo CD project ("Jazzolin") in 2013, on which he plays mandolin and fiddle backed by drums and bass.
