For example, after having used the wrong technique for years, I only learned on a later journey to the US how to chop properly. At least I could profit from one ragtime technique: dampening the strings with the fingers of the right hand didn’t cause me any problems. If you don’t have anybody to guide you in learning an instrument you can’t help getting things wrong and later it is extremely difficult to get rid of those wrong habits. This meant a complete change and I felt like an absolute beginner once more. The sound is bad, there is hardly volume and your fingers ache. So, thumbpicks and fingerpicks became essential. I quickly realized, however, that playing the dobro this way, you don’t have a chance to get heard among the other instruments in a jam, for example. It seemed logical to me to simply transfer this technique onto the dobro. That was easy for me, because on the guitar I was able to play the ragtime finger-picking style. MG: In the first half year I played without fingerpicks. SJ: How did you learn to play? Were there any special practice techniques or tools that you found especially helpful to advancing your playing skills? Mike Auldridge, Stacy Phillips and Jerry Douglas had the greatest influence on me during my early years with this instrument. Through those musicians I was able to obtain first-rate recordings and when I listened to Jerry Douglas for the first time it was clear that no other instrument would ever fascinate me as much as the dobro. This really helped me a lot to learn more about playing techniques. They were representatives of all kinds of styles like Irish Folk, Blues and there were even Bluegrass musicians, who made me acquainted with Stacy Phillips’ manual ‘The Dobro Book’. Mike plays incredibly clean and has an excellent sound. As time went by I tried to find musicians in the region with mutual interests and found quite a few in Stuttgart. Today I am really happy about the fact that it was Mike Auldridge who has had a formative influence on me at this early stage. That was all I had to start with. In the following time I continually listened to the sound of those two records and tried to imitate the tunes as well as I could. Luckily the dealer in Munich not only sold the dobro to me but also a Stevens steel bar and two Auldridge records. At that time there were no records, manuals or workshops whatsoever for people wanting to learn this instrument. SJ: Where do you trace your musical heritage from on the dobro? Who were your heroes when you were learning to play? Apart from that he gave me the address of a German dealer selling dobros close to Munich. When I returned home, it didn’t take long until I possessed my first squareneck dobro. The manager, Ron Lazar, was incredibly nice, showed me around and informed me about the whole range of dobro manufacturing. If only I had had that information at the time!!! Nevertheless, I decided to change my plans and travelled right back to Huntington Beach in order to visit the dobro factory. I knew where Huntington Beach was because I had passed it two days earlier. That technique of playing, that sound and that kind of Bluegrass music in general filled me with enthusiasm. After a long conversation with that musician I had found out that those instruments were produced in Huntington Beach. This took me by surprise and made me feel really excited. At the turning point of a cable car I happened to see a Bluegrass band and one of the boys played a dobro lap style. Such was the situation in Germany when I grew up.īut this changed two weeks later when my journey led me to San Francisco. At that time I had no idea that there were also squareneck dobros and naturally I had never heard of Bluegrass music. It was a metal body dobro which at that time cost $ 400 – and was identical with the one on the cover of the Allman Brothers record. On a trip through the USA I bought my first dobro in New Orleans. I studied that picture closely and soon decided that I would one day possess such an incredible instrument. In the year 1978 I achieved my goal. Only after I came across a record by the Allman Brothers whose cover showed a dobro did I realize what one looked like. In the seventies when I started playing the guitar and was listening to records by Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers or various Blues artists, the sound of this instrument always amazed me – that was a long time before I even knew its name. When I consciously listened to a dobro for the first time is hard to tell.
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