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By Wayne Erbsen Unless a free mandolin just falls in your lap, you’ll need to purchase one. When you go shopping for a mandolin, I strongly suggest that you don’t buy a cheap one off the Internet. Most of these cheapo instruments will sound like a tin can strung with barbed wire. Instead, you should… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen Heck no! It’s easy as eating pie if you approach learning the mandolin in the right way. Of course, there is no shortage of free information, tab, and musical notation of mandolin music on the web. The challenge is finding information that’s geared to your style of learning. A lot of the… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen As you might guess, there are numerous differences between old-time and bluegrass music, although they share a lot of similarities too. In old-time music, the banjo, fiddle, and mandolin generally play the melody all at the same time. During an old-time tune, the guitar generally refrains from playing the melody and concentrates… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen The Internet is abuzz with people wanting to learn to play the mandolin. My guess is that you are one of them! Of course, you want to learn the easiest songs possible. Who wouldn’t? The songs that are the easiest to play are the tunes you already know. They’re the ones you’ve… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen Mandolins come in many flavors, several styles, and many price ranges. I’ll pass on to you the same advice someone gave me about 50 years ago. Spend as much as you can stretch, and purchase a quality instrument, rather than a piece of junk. A really cheap mandolin will sound tinny, which… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen Practically everybody who plays the mandolin wants to play by ear. What does that mean? It means playing without reading music or tab. To play by ear, you need to know a little bit about three things: 1) simple scales, 2) chords, 3) walk-ups and walk-downs. 1) Simple scales. This is the… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen In my article entitled Mandolin Chords, I showed you a number of basic mandolin chords. Armed with that knowledge, there are thousands of songs you can play simply by strumming the chord and singing, humming or whistling the song. Before you can do that you will need to figure out which chords… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen Mandolins are fun to play, but they’re a pain in the you-know-what to tune. Why? Because the double strings are like quarreling siblings who never seem to agree with each other. Nonetheless, in this article, I will show you how to easily get your mandolin more or less in tune. As you… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen By now you’ve learned to play a few tunes on the mandolin. You know some of your basic chords, and you’d love to be able to play with other musicians in a jam, but you’re “chicken.” That’s because up to now, you’ve just been playing by yourself in the closet, so to… Read More »
By Wayne Erbsen Compared to the guitar, mandolin chords are EASY. In fact, most mandolin chords only use two fingers or sometimes only one. In the mandolin chord charts below, each horizontal line represents a pair of mandolin strings. The E string is the one closest to the floor, as you hold your mandolin in… Read More »
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