https://banjobenclark.com/lessons/old-joe-clark-basic-melody-mandolin-beginner
Now that you’ve made it through Boot Camp, it’s time to learn our first song! Old Joe Clark is one of the most common fiddle tunes there ever was. I love it…though I may be a little partial to the name.
Hi, I keep seeing “lessons” that refer to “having made it through the boot camp.” However, I don’t really know what the “boot camp” is. I’m paying member, I think it’s called “gold pick.” Do I have access to the boot camp? Where? TBH, it would help very much because the access I have seems to give me a huge volume of lessons (and I really like them and the teaching style) but I am a bit overwhelmed about where I should start and how I should progress through them. I am sure Im missing something glaringly obvious, but just wondering if there is some sort of progression on the website. Maybe that’s what is meant by the “boot camp.” Thanks in advance for any replies.
Hey Troy, welcome to the forum!
Mandolin Boot Camp is part of the course framework we’re planning for the new site remodel. On the new site, everything will be laid out in a structured roadmap of courses designed to take you from beginning to end, just like you mentioned. “Boot Camp” is the first course in the roadmap.
The material within Boot Camp is already on the site though. It starts with the lessons contained in the Mandolin Basics course, and also contains some non-playing related starter lessons:
Be an Educated Mandolin Buyer
Essential Mandolin Accessories & More!
How to Change Mandolin Strings, String Study & More!
All About Tuners
How to Tune Your Mandolin
How to Read Mandolin Tab
FYI, the roadmap is essentially a more structured replacement for the checklists. Not sure if you’ve used these yet, but they are just checklists with a suggested order of lessons for you to work through. Here’s the Beginner Mandolin Checklist:
https://banjobenclark.com/university/beginner-mandolin-checklist
This is super helpful. I assume there is also a checklist for intermediate and advanced, I guess I’ll just substitute those words into the same URL you provided to search for those checklists. I will very much appreciate the new organization when it becomes available, because it kindof feels like just reaching into a grab-bag right now.
Yep! They are also located at the top of the Mandolin page (under “Learning Tracks”) for quick access. 
I was wondering if there is still going to be a roadmap provided to guide our learning?
Right now I am just doing down the checklist. Sometimes I’m not sure if I am prepared for the next lesson as it appears in the checklist.
Howdy @whimpbl!
If you’re on the beginner learning track, that is the roadmap that is arranged in order. On my new site launching this year, the learning track will be made of the same lessons, but pared down to what I’d consider the essentials.
I really enjoyed this lesson. A few years ago I learned, memorized, one of the traditional, just the melody, AABB versions. Going through this with the variations with two different A parts and two different B parts is fun. I can now play this from memory with the 160 bpm backing track. I am going through the beginner checklist to learn and go through the necessary building blocks that I have not obtained before. I really like playing from memory. I can find melody notes and melody fairly easily. However, I don’t naturally hear variations easily (at least not “tasty” variations).
That’ll come, and we can work on that specifically!
I recently purchased TablEdit software. I used the TEF file to learn this beginner Old Joe Clark version. What a great tool. In the past, I have resisted getting “play along with” tools. So, I didn’t explore a lot of the various tools. TablEdit helped me with speeding up my learning for this in several ways. It helped a lot with timing, which is a huge benefit, getting used to the fingering, and hearing it as you are playing is very useful. What I was a little worried about, which I am not now, is that I would start to rely on it too much and not commit to memory. However, that was an unfounded worry. The way around that is at a certain point, I switched to playing against the backing track, the slow one first, to get it firmly into my memory, and once have that, progress to the faster track.