In Praise of Today’s “Beginner’s Mandolin
I’ll try to keep this short. About 20 or so years ago I was an avid bluegrasser, mandolin player, wannabe guitar player and recovering banjo player. Life sort of got in the way and I just stopped playing music at all. I mean I didn’t touch a string for all that time. In any respect, when this pandemic hit us, I recognized right away that I was in for a long, loooong house arrest. I was 73 years old with a compromised immune system, so I was virtually under house arrest for the duration. I bought a guitar to keep me from going stir crazy. It didn’t work. I realize now that I was already nuts. But, I digress. A month or so ago I decided to add a mandolin to my stable. Remember that my last interaction with any stringed instrument was 25 years ago. The several guitars and lone mandolin that I acquired have amazed me. They are so much better in every way than the entry level instruments that I learned on many years ago. Yes I did own some really great instruments, a Martin D-28 Standard guitar, a Gibson F-5L mandolin and a Gibson RB-800 banjo, so I do know the difference. I’ll concentrate on the mandolin here, but what I am saying applies to all of the instruments that I have bought over the last two years and to some that I only wish that I can buy. The quality of the instruments available today is at least an order of magnitude higher than the equivalent that was available 20 or 25 years ago in every respect. I only hope that the beginners here, and once again I must count myself in that class, understand that what is available today will radically improve your learning curve in a positive direction over what was available “back in the day”. If you really want to know what a decent “intro level” mandolin would cost back then, it was about $250. Today that mandolin would cost you about $375. The big difference is that to have gotten the quality of today’s $350 mandolin you would have had to have spent well over $500 or $600 dollars which would be much more than that in todays dollars. Understand that I am not just rooting tje horn on my Ibanez, I’m shouting out about the incredible improvement in the quality of instruments available today, so count your blessings.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't.
Ibanez M-522
Gold Tone GM 10 Frypan
Bookmarks