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Thanks for all this guys, this is really interesting. A question - do ornaments in Irish music on mandolin tend to be 'all picked' more than in say triplets in bluegrass? The reason I ask is that if...

It seems like there's a conflict in mandolin design between having enough frets to play the music you want and and being able to pick the strings in the best sounding place. How many frets do most...

I suspect thick finish kills tone. This is OT, but years ago my boy bought a cheapish Epiphone 'Zakk Wylde' Les Paul style guitar. The guitar top was 'painted' a fetching shade of moss green with...

I had a set of Pegheds on a 5 string cello I had made about 10 years ago, and I now have a set of Witttner geared pegs on a plain gut strung Baroque setup fiddle. I don't know if Pegheds still have...

I mentioned to a more experienced mando player that fretting it feels harder than guitar and he said "me too, that's because it is". He reckons the combination of shorter distance between the frets...

That's great. I could fit my Cumberland bridge myself, but I'm not that far away from TAMCo in Brighton UK. Their tech works on the handmade US made mandolins they sell, so my lowly Eastman should be...

The seller's listed as in Ukraine on Ebay.co.uk, more hand painted mandos and balalaikas, even one (so far) unpainted mandolin, and lots of objects d'art and paintings of Soviet worthies - Marx,...

What they said. I'm a mandolin beginner, but I find a strap means you can sit and play and just stand up and keep playing. I find a Tone-Gard means it sounds the sme to me whichever I'm doing, there...

I'd advise starting on acoustic for one reason, and that's that you don't have so many options to fiddle with STUFF. That's a lot easier than learning to play the mandolin, and years ago I did it...

Through learning several instruments I've come to the conclusion that there are different learning styles that work differently for different folks and for different purposes. For me, the outright...

Technical details? Strings? No, they just tell you how good they are, like that's all musicians understand :)

Mishtake...

Sure - but I've used them and found the marketing claims for these strings to stand up well enough in practice. I was always popping the .009 octave G on my 25.5" 12 string till I got hold of those....

Al - what kind of music do you expect to play? TAMCO in Brighton sounds like a great idea if you do fancy a US made instrument. I'd hate to have to sort out transport damage at that distance. Also,...

It could be worse - the defininition of a Scottish gentleman is someone who can play bagpipes, but doesn't.

I don't know enough improvising mandolin players work - but if you listen to popular (with the public) guitarists then noticeably innovative ones, you can often tell which ones learned hundreds of...

That's all true, but the strings I'm talking about different.They're higher carbon than regular strings, which makes them tougher. I've used them on guitars, and you can bend notes further without...

I played fiddle in Scottish dance bands in UK for years. The usual way to play jigs in one of those bands is to swing them - syncopate with the 1st note of every group lengthened, the second...

Suppose you're playing an Irish jig. One bar of 6/8, 2 x 3 eighth notes goes 'diddly diddly', bowed NVN VNV on fiddle. Or a 9/8 slip jig - 3 x 3 eighth notes, 'diddly diddly diddly', bowed NVN VNV...

My travel mandolin (and the first mandolin I had) is a Skyesound 'Wee Traveller' (made on the Isle of Skye, Scotland from reclaimed furniture wood). By moving the bridge a long way down the body, the...

Thanls Eric, I subscribed to Aaron's channel

It seems to me that when you buy different material string sets of the same gauge and make, you get the same plain string pairs in all sets. So, if you take D'Addario strings in 11-40, then PB or...

Great! The single cutaway design looks really good.

So, I'm about two months into 'I play fiddle so let's do mandolin'. Areas like improving sound, string crossing, cleaner picking, slowly building up speed and tremelo, are under way. I know where all...

$600-ish was perfect for me, and besides, that's what I had to spend...