How did you find the mandolin world?

[catmandu2]

Plus, keyboards were his first instrument and he was choirmaster and organist at a church before moving full time to rock n roll. Quite a guy.

I like all of those cats who were in choir and played keys in rock bands. Steve Winwood (and Dave Mason) et al...I heard a lot more English folk music probably before my Monroe, Earl and co...all of the rock bands I was hearing were from Britian.. (I liked psychedelia too). Funny I play British/Isles trad..on a squeezy box no less

[Denman John]

I've played guitar for a while and when my eldest son turned 7, he wanted a guitar for his birthday. I looked around but couldn't find anything in his size that sounded any good, so we decided on a mandolin. While doing research on mandolins I found this place and bought a Breedlove A style for him from the classifieds. When it arrived I instantly thought "I got to get one of these things for myself" ~ which I did. My son is now almost 12 and can play circles around me, but I still have a lot of fun and pick everyday. When my youngest son turned 7, he also wanted a mandolin for his birthday. This past winter my wife started picking up the Breedlove and figured out things pretty quickly, so now she wants one as well.

I had heard mandolin in music, but it wasn't something that I gravitated towards musically consciously. It wasn't until I actually played one that I fell in love with it. Now the whole family can't get enough of it.

[journeybear]

... a friend of mine picked up a battered old bowlback from a charity shop for i think 50p. It had a full complement of strings...just about... and none of us knew how to tune it so just went with DGBE, like the top 4 on a guitar. !

Or in other words, Greek bouzouki tuning.

This and other mentions of bowlbacks reminded me of my own first encounter with a mandolin. When I was eight my folks bought a summer house, an 1830s farmhouse on a couple of acres, with a barn and some other small sheds, trout pond in the back, watercress in the stream, berry bushes all over as well as grape vines and a pear tree, a mile from the ocean. My mom got the house as part of the divorce settlement several years later, and this became my home, where my heart was. It really had been all along; this just made it official.

Anyway, when we moved in, it had been vacant for quite some time, and there were all manner of things, A few slats were separated, and it had a twig for a bridge - I swear - but I used to tinker around with it a bit all the same. I had no idea how to tune those rusty strings, and since I was at an easily distracted age, I didn't put much effort into sorting it out.

When my mom gave me a real mandolin seven years later, it was pretty much love at first sight. I had no idea how to tune it, and struggled with what limited resources I had at hand. My folks did have a goodly number of reference books on the shelves, including The Oxford Companion To Music. The entry for mandolin was very skimpy, stating that it was of minor importance (in the context of classical orchestral music, I believe that's what they meant) and that it was tuned like a violin. Well, there was plenty of information there about that instrument, and soon thereafter I hitchhiked to the nearest music store, twenty mikes away, and bought a violin pitch pipe. That got me on my way. And I did make some attempts to resurrect that bowlback, and was impressed at its sustain, but never tried to get it into good working order.

[Bren]

Growing up in 60s, starting to play in the 70s - like many first mandolins i heard were in rock bands:
Levon Helm in the Band
Ry Cooder solo records and Stones Love in Vain
Rory Gallagher - Goin to my Hometown.
Led Zep I guess though it didn't really register.
Maggie May of course - only found out recently (as most of us did) that it was Ray Jackson of Lindisfarne
McGuinness Flint - When I'm dead & Gone

Some local bands in Australia at the time:

Kerryn Tolhurst in The Dingoes and Country Radio with the late Greg Quill.

Louis McManus of the Bushwackers and many others. A terrifi player, he seemed ubiquitous around Melbourne on mandolin, fiddle and banjo but it's frustratingly hard to find decent recordings or videos of him.

Kerryn Tolhurst lives in the USA now but here is a clip of him leading off on Gypsy Queen back in 1972:

[Bren]

Then there was the folky thing:

Barney occasionally playing mandolin in the Dubliners
Mike Seeger (I think) on the Clancy Brothers recording of Leaving of Liverpool

And then Planxty which really brought mandolin to the fore.

[Niavlys]

I could think of worse places to travel than the south of France that is for sure. Does anyone know if they are having this mandolin festival again this year? The Facebook page has not been updated since last fall. I would seriously consider going although I might hesitate to tell my wife that a mandolin festival was going on until we got there! That will surely go over like a "Led Zeppelin"

Sean

Here is the news, even though you may have seen it already: Lunel's mandolin festival is of course happening again this year, October 22-25, 2014!

The new edition 2014 is going to pay tribute to the original homeland of the mandolin : Italy.
The festival is also inviting musicians from the USA, Colombia, Brazil, and France.

The entire program isn't available yet, but if you go to http://www.mandolinesdelunel.com/2014/programme/ you'll be able to see (in the slideshow at the top) some of the artists invited, Sierra Hull being one of them (the only one that I know, and incidentally the one who made me discover the mandolin)

[journeybear]

Revisiting this thread, I noticed an egregious error in my last post. Somewhere in the editing process, some crucial words got excised from paragraph #2. The post should read more like this:

This and other mentions of bowlbacks reminded me of my own first encounter with a mandolin. When I was eight my folks bought a summer house, an 1830s farmhouse on a couple of acres, with a barn and some other small sheds, trout pond in the back, watercress in the stream, berry bushes all over as well as grape vines and a pear tree, a mile from the ocean. My mom got the house as part of the divorce settlement several years later, and this became my home, where my heart was. It really had been all along; this just made it official.

Anyway, when we moved in, it had been vacant for quite some time, and there were all manner of things in the attic, artifacts from a bygone era: a set of paper dolls with their clothes, a bunch of old newspapers, in which we found advertisements for Pear's soap, which became the house brand, and an old bowlback mandolin. A few slats were separated, and it had a twig for a bridge - I swear - but I used to tinker around with it a bit all the same. I had no idea how to tune those rusty strings, and since I was at an easily distracted age, I didn't put much effort into sorting it out.

When my mom gave me a real mandolin seven years later, it was pretty much love at first sight. I had no idea how to tune it, and struggled with what limited resources I had at hand. My folks did have a goodly number of reference books on the shelves, including The Oxford Companion To Music. The entry for mandolin was very skimpy, stating that it was of minor importance (in the context of classical orchestral music, I believe that's what they meant) and that it was tuned like a violin. Well, there was plenty of information there about that instrument, and soon thereafter I hitchhiked to the nearest music store, twenty mikes away, and bought a violin pitch pipe. That got me on my way. And I did make some attempts to resurrect that bowlback, and was impressed at its sustain, but never tried to get it into good working order.

[kkmm]

When I was in elementary school, I had a music teacher that play mandolin and sing to teach us singing the tunes. I love the sound of this instrument. But I never had a chance to hold a mandolin until 50 years later, a friend of mine gave me a Johnson, I played for 4 weeks then bought a good one and return the Johnson to her. That's how I started.