Re: Learning to find the notes on the mandolin neck
Two thoughts, seemingly almost trivial, but they helped me thru your current stage of confusion:
1- When I was at your point on guitar (uhm, six decades ago?), learning "up the neck" first involved learning the notes at the fret markers on the high and low strings. On guitar, that's almost cheating because both are Es, but learning only, at first, mandolin's G & E-string fret marker notes makes for a relatively easy, but very solid, foundation.
(1a- Then he avoided "music theory" for the next half-century...)
2- When it came to learning mandolin, I found that singing the name of each note as I played it was a great reinforcement. Even helped get my singing talent all the way up to "approaching tolerable"!
Those two things should be fairly easy to add onto your instructor's approach, whichever that may be.
A slightly more advanced "future viewpoint":
In reality, I find that knowing every single note is not a critical skill, but knowing where to find the root note of the key or chord you're on is critical, and is far less to recall in the heat of battle. Once you have that "anchor point", the rest of the chord/melody/whatever will fall into place relative to the root note, rather than every possible note being ID'd as the "the X-note at the N-fret of the Y-string", which is intended to say that this stuff will seem WAY easier a year from now!
Last edited by EdHanrahan; Feb-18-2021 at 12:53pm.
- Ed
"Then one day we weren't as young as before
Our mistakes weren't quite so easy to undo
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I'm a better man for just the knowin' of you."
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