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Music to Mucky the Duck

You literally cannot get any farther from the traditional roots of bluegrass anywhere on the planet, at least geographically speaking, than the sunny, south coast of the Australian continent. The distance alone has proven a major barrier to Australia making much of a lasting impact on bluegrass, despite the fact that the musical style has made a foothold Down Under.

For years, Australia's most successful bluegrass export wasn't even known best as a musician, but as a bluegrass luthier - the lanky Steve Gilchrist, builder of superb mandolins praised by the likes to Mike Compton, David Long and Ronnie McCoury as among the great bluegrass instruments ever created (and Steve's a fine player in his own right).

Until now, there hasn't been a homegrown Aussie player to achieve world-class status as a mandolinist. Enter Kym Warner, who grew up in Adelaide just a few miles from Australia's famed beaches in a home where bluegrass and country music was king.

A true bluegrass refugee who emigrated from the Land Down Under to the state of Texas to pursue his dream of playing bluegrass mandolin professionally, Warner has gained enormous acclaim for his work with the glorious Greencards, the neo-bluegrass band he formed in Austin with fellow expatriate Aussie Carol Young and another string player seeking greener fields for his musical expression, British fiddler Eamon McLoughlin.

With three remarkable albums under their belts and a wealth of touring experience, including a recent stint at Winfield, Kansas, and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) with the redoubtable Bryan Sutton filling the group's ever-revolving guitar chair, the Greencards have established a glowing sound and neo-acoustic style that cannot be called bluegrass, but that draws upon that style in addition to folk, Celtic and British Isles music, traditional country and other sounds to create a breathtakingly fresh, original sound.

The same can be said for Warner's mandolin style. A self-admitted Sam Bush freak who only took up mandolin seriously after being exposed to Bush's early albums with the fabled New Grass Revival, Warner's style and sound have become increasingly unique and personal as he absorbs influences ranging from Adam Steffey to Chris Thile, Mike Marshall and more.

"My dad is a musician. Still is to this day, and he's really into bluegrass music," says Warner. "I grew up with Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Hank Williams, Buck Owens and other roots-oriented music, like the Everly Brothers." A talented player who could hold his own on every bluegrass instrument except bass, the elder Warner predominantly played banjo and fiddle.

"The first thing I did was take classical violin lessons, although I didn't apply myself very well," Warner admits. "As soon as I could play anything, I started learning fiddle tunes, not the Suzuki Method violin I was being taught. After I was about three or four years into it, I asked for a mandolin because I knew it was the same tuning.

"I didn't jump into understanding the mandolin for the first few years I played. I learned some fiddle tunes, but at that point I wasn't sure it would be a career. But then I heard Sam (Bush) and I knew that was the thing I had been searching for and hadn't realized it," he recalls.

A special mandolin edition of the original Frets Magazine helped fuel Kym's fire for the instrument. A fan of Bob Marley and the Wailers, hearing Sam Bush play reggae further intensified his interest and passion. Before long, he'd ordered the Sam Bush Homespun Tapes' videos and built his early style around Bush's unregimented left hand and ferocious right-hand attack and power.

But as he grew as an artist, Warner quite naturally began realizing that he needed to forge his own sound and style. He found the linear, highly melodic sound of Adam Steffey appealing, particularly Steffey's work with Alison Krause and Union Station. "That was it for me," he remembers thinking back then.

"That big, fat, round tone Adam gets; that's what I want to sound like. So I jumped into listening to a lot of Steffey to try to get that tone he had," he tells Mandolin Magazine.

While living in Australia, all of this mandolin practice and development work went on behind closed doors for Kym Warner. Out in the real world, there was literally no opportunity to play mandolin in public regularly.

Instead, Warner played Telecaster in a variety of Aussie country cover bands, "doing country shows to make ends meet. I might play mandolin on one tune, but otherwise it was just country stuff," he says.

Frustrated over the lack of acoustic music outlets, Warner and friend Carol Young, who supplies the bass and lead vocals for the Greencards, started playing together and scaring up what few gigs they could just so they could play the music they loved. But it was obvious they could never make enough money doing that to earn a living in Australia, so in January 2001 they packed up and moved to Texas.

A brief stop in west Texas led to a relocation to the music-rich Austin scene, where the band quickly established itself as a premier attraction in the city's bars, clubs and coffee houses. "We were doing five or six gigs a week," Warner says, a far cry from his homeland where he might have only played that many acoustic gigs a year.

"We didn't get paid a lot, but we were working up our repertoire and sound. It was really good for us to do five four-hour shows a week, just slamming it out. It does really good things for your playing."

The band's growing popularity finally led them to abandon Texas for the center of America's bluegrass and country music establishment, Nashville. That change also brought Kym Warner into frequent contact with the hottest bluegrass musicians in the country. He soon was playing and jamming with top mandolinists, absorbing new influences and further refining his technique.

He said he abandoned his bad habit of planting the last two fingers of his right hand on the mandolin face, enormously freeing up his picking technique. He also realized that to get the sound, speed and tone he wanted, a lighter touch was required. So he began experimenting extensively with on-board pickups for his mandolin.

"I started working with a pickup so I could play lighter, and I found that my tone and fluidity got better. It was a simple fact for me that I was playing so much better; it enabled me to work on new stuff, too," Warner explains.

Moving to the States also has had a huge impact on his playing. "I had done okay in Australia, but here there's a hot mandolin player in every town. So we really have to push ourselves, learn new tunes and arrangements.

"Just the amount of work I was doing helped me to get much more comfortable, to get both the left and right hands talking together in a new way. I find now that I'm much more fluid and comfortable."

The Greencards' musical direction also has impacted dramatically Warner's approach to playing mandolin. Since the band is not a hot licks-driven, up-tempo bluegrass band in the style of Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, Warner looks at his instrument as a supporting element to the overall sound of the group. That's especially true when it comes to supporting the lovely, almost ethereal sound of Carol Young's soprano voice.

Warner constantly strives to find new ways to incorporate his mandolin sound into a broader arrangement that can allow Young's voice to carry the tune and express the emotional weight of the material. Blending frequently with McLoughlin's fiddle, Warner uses the mandolin to build structure within the band's overall sound.

"We have to create tone, the picture behind the vocals to support the dynamics that come from that," he explains. "I think the mandolin has a lot to do with dynamics; it's like a snare drum."

Because of that percussive sound, Warner concentrates totally on playing a precise rhythm pattern until it's time to take a solo. He carefully avoids dropping extraneous mandolin fills or riffs in behind Young's voice for fear of doing anything

that might distract the listener.

"It's a very important role in our band for the mandolin to stay out of the way and not be heard all the time. I'm not going to just throw something in for the sake of doing it," he says.

"I think of playing not as many notes as I can; instead finding the one note that's right as opposed to the four that you can play. My goal is to find a vibe or the right tension, and a lot of that has to do with finding the right tone out of my instrument. The song is best supported by me when I have a light touch and a great tone. That's when I can play one note and it sits there. Tone has so much to do with it for me."

Of course, getting great tone takes a great instrument. Warner has a fine Gilchrist A-model, but when he moved to Austin he developed a relationship with Collings Guitars and Mandolins and began playing a stock MT2 A-Model Collings. Recently, after becoming beguiled by the sound of Englemann spruce-topped mandolins owned by Chris Thile and several other top players, Warner had Collings build him a custom, varnish-finished MT2 with an Englemann top instead of the standard Adirondack spruce. "

I prefer the Englemann because there's a darkness and warmth in it. It gives me a great round tone. I think Englemann gets that beautiful pop out of the wood that suits me better than Adirondack," he says.

Getting that sound to an audience can challenge any sound engineer, but through extensive experimentation Warner has settled on the Schertler mandolin pickup as his pickup of choice.

"To me, it's the only pickup that sounds even remotely like a mandolin. It took some messing around to find the right spot, but it's really true sounding.

"You can hear the air in there," he says of the stick-on pickup's design. After spending time touring as an opening act with major acts like Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, Warner says he discovered the Avalon U5 preamp that was used by the engineers on those shows. "It's like taking a blanket off the sound," he says.

Modern string technology also has come to Warner's rescue, he adds. Possessing noticeably acidic oils in his perspiration, he would kill a fresh set of strings in as little as 20 minutes. But after trying virtually every set of mandolin strings available without success, he eventually came upon the Elixir coated strings and it's changed his life as a musician.

"I can get through a week of shows on one set of Elixirs," says Warner. He's using a stock medium set, gauges .011 to .04 0. Another key to his fat, round tone is his pick, the 1.4 millimeter triangular model manufactured by Dutch pick innovator Michel Wegen.

"I can't use the rounded ones like the Grisman pick. These have enough of a point, but not too much. I angle the pick edge sort of downward. I think they record great, and I get a really nice response with them," he explains.

The same could be said of how audiences react to the Greencards' music - a really nice response. Warner says he feels tremendously fortunate to be in the band and to have achieved so much as a professional musician in America.

"I feel very, very lucky to be in this band. It is great playing original music," he says. The band's new album, Viridian, is a natural progression in its growth and maturity, he feels. "We can't keep making the same record.

"I don't want to hear an artist make the same record; I want to hear that development. We listened to different things and tried to come up with something different that still sounded like the Greencards."

Ask Kym Warner if he has aspirations for other projects and he genuinely backs away from any such ambition, at least as long as his current band remains alive and well.

If pressed, he'll say he might want to attempt a duo recording along the lines of CDs by Darol Anger and Mike Marshall. But for this Aussie, he's got the world right where he wants it right now.

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