Category: Articles

How to Jam on the Mandolin

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 speak.

Well, it may be time to walk proudly out of the closet and into the limelight. Or, on the other hand, you may need to go deeper into your closet, pulling a coat down over your head (just kidding).

Let’s take this little

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Easy Two-Finger Mandolin Chords

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 playing position, and the G string is closest to the ceiling. The numbers represent the fret. Be sure to place your fingers between, not on, the fret. The letter to the left of each chord chart tells you the name of that chord. The letters

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Easy Mandolin Songs

By Wayne Erbsen

In my article Mandolin Chords, I showed you a number of two-finger chords you can play on the mandolin. 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 to play when.

The good news is that most bluegrass songs can be played with just three chords. These three chords form a little family called a “key.” We often give the chords in this family the numbers 1 4

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Buying a Used Guitar

By Bob Smakula

First, play the guitar. Is there excessive buzzing? Is it too easy to play or do you need hydraulic-assisted fingers? String height is determined by several factors. Nut height, saddle height, neck curvature and neck angle all make one guitar’s action better or worse than another’s. String height can be changed to suit any playing style. My opinion of ideal string height for a steel string guitar (measured from the top of the fret to the bottom of the string at the 12th fret) is 1/16″ at the high E gradually increasing to 3/32″ at the low

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How to Play Mandolin

By Wayne Erbsen

NOTE: I wrote this article in back in 1980 for the Mother Earth News.

Some people call it a ‘tator bug because of its traditional round back, but most people know it as a mandolin. The instrument, a distant relative of the lute and (even more distantly) the guitar, was brought to America from eastern Europe during the last century. It wasn’t exactly an overnight success, though — probably because the import’s bowl-like back made it frustratingly hard to hang onto to play.

But in the late 1800’s, an instrument maker in Kalamazoo, Michigan, named Orville Gibson

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Thicker’n Fiddlers in Hell

Old-Time Fiddle for the Complete Ignoramus! instruction book by Wayne Erbsen

By Wayne Erbsen

Throughout its long and spicy history, the fiddle has been both loved and loathed. In early frontier days fiddlers were held in the highest esteem, even above doctors, lawyers, and politicians. It was a lone fiddler who held sway at community dances, which were the most popular form of entertainment in early America. Without the fiddler, there simply was no dance. A pioneer community that could boast having a fiddler was the envy of all, and a skilled fiddler was always in demand to play for community gatherings, such as barn dances, log rollings, corn-shuckings and bean-stringings.

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