MSI 3 has 13 more tunes featuring classic repertoire with meticulous note-note-note, phrase-by phrase, all by-ear instruction that you will only find in this course. Students will continue with the core modular devices that provide a way into understanding how to implement the improvisational jump-offs in intuitive, practical ways that are not only great practice with the tunes taught here, but can be easily incorporated into all of your mandolin picking across the board in your own creative way.

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Week 1 - MSI 3 starts off with Lonesome Moonlight Waltz. Here students get to know how to play a steady, linear tremolo and adapt it to this classic melody while also keeping in mind how to tastefully employ staggered 16th notes to arpeggiate through the beautiful chord changes. The Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe album is used for reference of “the truth”.

Week 2 - Bluegrass Stomp is a classic blues form that has helped folks get well acquainted with the use of heavy, repeated downstrokes for great effect. A special guest this week helps provide another voice in understanding Bill’s classic gambit and first improvising jump-off. Favorite devices can be used as students will learn more about how to stay within the tune's structure and still come up with interesting improvisational variations that are hopefully tasteful and appropriate.

Week 3 - Big Mon is one of the most popular go-to Monroe tunes in jam sessions and on stage. In week 3 students dive into the nuclear level to really understand what Bill’s creative and improvising mind-set was here that makes a stark contrast to the twin fiddles on the original recording. Students will also look at how to arpeggiate their way through the chord form to create a Monroe Style break for the third part which often does not get played. Time will be spent examining the form in great detail trying to decode what Monroe shares with his breaks in the context of the other instruments. Big Mon is a great vehicle for the growing lexicon of modular devices

Week 4- Salt Creek is one of the classic parking lot picking tunes of all time. Its chord form easily lends itself to expansive creative opportunity. Here students will study a general Monroe Style break, not note-for-note off the record, but in doing so, it will help them find their legs with what the special guest this week calls “the ladder lick”, also known in the course as a modulated staggered arpeggio.

Week 5 - In this week, and all the following weeks, David McLaughlin provides beautiful and thoughtful demonstrations on his 1923 Gibson F-5 Lloyd Loar Mandolin. Turkey in the Straw is a tune that Bill taught David directly and so our study is based off this note path. Staggered arpeggios and Slidey licks work to great effect over this classic melody

Week 6 - Goin’ Up the Big Sandy River shows us lots of interesting things like how to employ a minor third over a major chord to create a great Monroe-style bluegrass tonality. We also get a ton of great practice quickly arpeggiating through the 1-4-5 chord pattern of the B part. We use the Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe album again for our guide on this tune.

Week 7 - The Watson Blues gives a perfect chance to study how to use a fast tremolo over a blues form. This is one of the most challenging and rewarding studies. To get the nuance and articulation of this study can take a long time, but teaches invaluable essences of Bill’s improvisational palette.

Week 8 - For our Christmas week – we took on two selections: Santa Claus, a great tune in G that has the pre-eminent example of a lick that we have used since the beginning of the course, the “Santa Claus” lick, and Christmas Time’s a Comin’ where Bill shows us how to a marvelous sextuplet triple tremolo to thread with a simple melody for a tremendously textural effect

Week 9 - The last four weeks get into some really intense and challenging material. Ebenezer Scrooge is one of the most powerful and epic instrumental tunes of any genre, a true bluegrass masterpiece that Bill wrote after watching The Christmas Carol one night. The opening eighth notes designate the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in a very dramatic way. This four part tune is a really big lift so to speak and offers us insight in many directions, not the least of which is the careful precision that Bill used to draw his melodic lines and textures. We explore how to generate some of our own creative ideas by modulating our devices in ways that reflect the important melody shape.

Week 10 - Old Daingerfield is one of the most popular Monroe tunes in the modern world. It gets played a lot by traditional and progressive pickers. We dig in deep to study the Master of Bluegrass original recording and the tricky business with the 5 beat C part beginning that has been a mystery for many for a long time. We look at a couple different slight variations that give great insight into how Bill would improvise in subtle ways while remaining right in the heart of the tune. This is a skill that takes a lot of time, patience, study, and practice.

Week 11 -  The Tanyards is one of the deepest and most esoteric tunes in Bill’s catalog. He never recorded it and tapes have circulated for years in the underground amongst the mandoluminati and has been a real favorite study with some of the folks that love Monroe’s music the most. This tune goes from minor to major in a very dramatic way. We look at how to find the melody in different registers and voicing which provide perspective with regard to the different tonalities that can be generated that way.

Week 12 - We look at an “easier” classic tune for our last week. That gets quotation marks because Bill’s exact melody lines are anything but easy to understand at first. Southern Flavor is an archetypal melody shape that descends largely from John Henry and reflects some of the Native American tonality that Bill was connected to, the ancient tones thrive in this piece. We learn how to approach the main melody in three different positions for an expansive improvising opportunity.

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