Here’s a great Tim O’Brien original called “Less and Less” from his Traveler album, and it’s a great example of O’Brien’s approach to the instrument. Octave mandolins, bouzoukis, and similar long-necked mandolin-family instruments became commonplace in traditional Irish music as early as the late 1960s, but primary credit goes to Tim O’Brien for introducing the octave mandolin into American string-band music a couple of decades later. Tim plays a guitar-shaped instrument (like Joe does) made by Michigan luthier Mike Kemnitzer that he calls a bouzouki, but it’s in conventional octave-mandolin tuning. The song is in the key of D with an AABA format, and Joe tries to convey as close to a note-for-note rendition of O’Brien’s playing in this lesson, which includes some challenging fingering and picking-hand technique. In this video, Joe shows you the first half of the song. He pays particular interest to how Tim emulates three-finger banjo rolls between key melody notes by moving the melodic line up and down on one string while keeping an active picking-pattern that incorporates adjacent open strings to fill in the sound. It’s not classic Jesse McReynold’s crosspicking, but it has much the same effect.
