Why play Mandolin?

[Charley wild]

It's always been at least a second if not third instrument. I took it up years ago just for fun and I play it today for the same reason. I'm always trying to learn and improve but I put no pressure on myself with the mandolin. So it's still a joy to pick it up every day.

[Andrew B. Carlson]

I fell in love with mandolin after hearing the first three notes of "Every Time You Say Goodbye" by Alison Krauss.

Great song. Makes me think I should try to learn that little intro. I don't suppose you learned it and maybe even tabbed it out?

[journeybear]

Because it was there. Seriously. One day it was just there, and I loved music, and I was making up songs, so I needed some way to interface these inside ideas with the outside world.

My mom had discerned an interest in music a couple years earlier and bought me a guitar for my 13th birthday, a cheap Sears $20 special, but I couldn't make sense of it - six strings versus four fingers, irregular intervals - then the neck began to warp until the strings were an inch from the neck at the join. Strangled it with its own strings and tossed the remains into the attic. Then one day my mom came up with a mandolin, an old Gibson pumpkin oval hole A model (much like what I play now; another story), in an OHSC (very convenient for hitchhiking, as I would discover later) with purple felt lining (very cool), and though I didn't know what it was, it made sense to me - four sets of strings, regular intervals - and it sounded pretty, all by itself - I mean, it just rang and jangled and shimmered, and sounded so exotic - which kept me interested in it long enough to figure it out. Plus, I kind of liked its underdog status, as well as being different from what everyone else was playing. So at jams, rather than being yet another guy with a guitar, I was a mandolinist, adding a different sound to the mix. This differentiation has stood me well to this day - if someone wants a mandolin they have to call me. (Yeah, kind of a big "if" sometimes, but still ... )

Finally, it is worth pointing out that i spent years listening to music and learning about it before I got to playing an instrument, and this was in New England, not a bluegrass-rich environment, so it was years after starting to play mandolin that I learned about bluegrass and what people expected to be played on the instrument. After "Love In Vain" by The Rolling Stones and "Fat Man" by Jethro Tull and "Goin' To Brownsville" by Ry Cooder and "Gasoline Alley" and "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart - this last one being the song that catapulted mandolin into familiarity for those outside the bluegrass community, and suddenly I was in demand - well, kind of. So I arrived at the mandolin from a rock background, and have been playing it that way ever since - expressing the music I love with it, rather than what other people expect from it. But I've always taken the road less travelled, and when there was a fork in the road, I took it. So I ended up here .... Eh, it's not so bad!

[Andrew B. Carlson]

I started playing because of Chris Thile. I continued playing because of Ricky Skaggs. I want to play till I die because of Bill Monroe.

I didn't expect to get the girls because of playing mandolin. But when I got more attention from them when I played, I didn't argue........until they said "I love the ukulele!"

[Axeman]

Mandos are used in a lot of rock, blues, folk, and country songs. I play all of those on guitar and love the sound of the two together.
I haven't tried bluegrass yet.
Plus, mandos are easy to schlep around.

[JeffD]

I have a good dental plan through work ( )so that ruled out the open back banjo that I love as well,

spilled my coffee

[Denny Gies]

Welcome. Why the mandolin? Why not?

[mandobassman]

I started out when I was 10 years old when I learned guitar. At age 14 my neighbor and I started a band (that lasted 30 years) and I was the guitarist. We were in high school and our mandolinist/violinist was one of our classmates. When he graduated high school he moved to Germany to study classical violin. We also had someone else in the band who sang lead and played guitar and we were suddenly in need of a mandolin player. I decided to learn mandolin. I went to a local music store and bought a $80 Harmony mandolin. I opened a Mel Bay "How to Play Mandolin" book and wrote down the tuning. I quickly realized that the tuning was the reverse of the lower strings on the guitar and figured out chords based on that. The rest was just listening to records and trying to copy what I heard. I fell in love with the mandolin very quickly and at one point I sold my guitar and actually didn't own a guitar again until just last year. I still enjoy playing guitar now and then, and I also play bass in another band, but the mandolin has always been my main love, musically speaking.

[JeffD]

It wasn't a guitar.

In the era I grew up everyone seemed to be playing guitar. It was supposed to be a chick magnet. It became a stereotype, all these loner introverted guys of varying degrees of talent playing Neil Young and sharing their emotions (even if they had to make them up), and if not Neil Young, later on it was James Taylor. What ever worked. And then all the Grateful Dead folks, having guitar jams and attracting what to my testosterone addled brain were the most beautiful women in the world.

But I have always had very strong contrarian blood, and became a huge Frank Zappa fan. (Making fun of everyone, perching his cigarette in the strings of the peg head, so very cool.)

The goal was not to emulate Zappa, it was to emulate his attitude and to take an independant stand a pace or two away from the ambient culture.

So I was a band geek in high school, playing alto clarinet in the band and bassoon in the orchestra, and a violin friend handed me a bowlback, and it seemed perfect. A stringed instrument I could carry and play (romantically while sitting on a steamer trunk at a remote train station), yet it was not a guitar. Deciedly not a guitar. In your face not a guitar. I might aspire to be a poser, (without shame, because authenticity doesn't mean much when you are so young and your self is still under construction, so you try out different poses to see what fits, before the clay dries.) But it would not be an entirely copied pose.

I had never heard a recorded mandolin, could not have told you who Bill Monroe was, but the mandolin was my little acre of intoverted too cool for school musician territory, and I bit down hard and became hooked.

[Jill McAuley]

A few years ago I bought a cheap Harmony mandolin as a birthday present for a friend. Put some new strings on it and was picking on it a wee bit myself prior to giving it to them. Well I ended up having so much fun with it that they got their present LATE because I couldn't bear to part with that little mandolin until I had one to call my own. At the same time I'd moved into an apartment building and was discovering that my tenor banjo was unfortunately not very "neighbor friendly", so the mandolin seemed the perfect solution to still being able to practice and learn new tunes without the constraints of waiting until my upstairs neighbor wasn't home. For the first few years I played mandolin exclusively, ignoring my other instruments, but this year has seen me rediscover my love of the tenor banjo, plus I've added a tenor guitar to the herd, and I've now got my eye on getting an acoustic guitar again (I've been playing guitar for 25+ years, but have been guitar-less since '08, due to the distractions of irish trad music and the mandolin). I still love the mandolin mind you, but it's been nice to start expanding my horizons a bit again.

Cheers,
Jill

[pjlama]

Umm... started playing bass at 11 took up guitar but never really loved it at 13, I gigged on bass from age 15 to 35. I Started a family and business in my early 30's so I couldn't play out very often anymore. Playing bass alone gets old.

My great grandfather made bowl backs so there was always these beautiful wall hangers around as a kid and I played in a couple bluegrass bands over the years and had an attraction to the instrument. So about five years ago I got a mandolin and found it was impossible to put down. For me with a primarily bass back ground it was like musical Tetrus, I had to transpose everything and make it work. Like someone else said four strings felt familiar plus the tuning despite being in fifths seemed similar. The size of the instrument makes it so easy to play anywhere so you wind up playing it a lot.

It had also opened the door for all the other mandolin family instruments; octave, dola, zook so I started playing all those too. Another benefit was mandolin burnout which got me to learn guitar seriously about a year ago. Anyway instead of being a bass player now I play a half dozen instruments proficiently and just traded an old bass for a drum kit last week so that's the next thing. At the end of the day I usually grab my mando though because it's so portable and there's a lot more to learn, it's a wonderful instrument that has made me a better musician and opened a lot of doors.

[journeybear]

Jill - Was this in scenic Oakland or forgotten East Galway? I can't really take my pick because I wasn't there. Um, the point I am trying to make is that environment does factor into one's development. As I mentioned, growing up in New England meant I wasn't exposed to bluegrass until my musical tastes and musicianship orientation were well-established. If I had grown up elsewhere things might have been very different. For instance, one grandmother was from Nashville originally, the other from Chicago. So if my parents hadn't met and set up camp where they did, I might have got into bluegrass/country or the blues instead ... well, earlier, anyway.

[rgray]

Saw one hanging in a local shop, never played an instrument and it looked cool. Internet research led me to the Cafe and away from the junk in the shop. Took the plunge to keep the old brain cells active (I was 50) and haven't regretted it once. Sold my first 2 (Morgan Monroe Bean Blossom and Kentucky 505) and now own 3 & 4.

[mandopete]

Why play mandolin? 'Cause they make much more noise that way!

[Richard Eskite]

I like mandolin for the wealth of music applicable to it. Trying to find music for, say the Weissenborn resonator guitar tuned to Open D is much more challenging. Anything for the fiddle goes with the mandolin. I am especially interested in Celtic folk music and there is a lot of material available without looking hard at all.

[Steve Lavelle]

Musical survival instinct. I played banjo first , learned a little guitar, then started in on the bass and played it for many years despite my short fingers. I nearly crippled my left hand from all the stretching I did on that long neck, so I had to stop. I remembered that I had played a mandolin in the college dorms and bought a cheap one. found I could play it without the pain. A few years later I bought a new Flatiron F Performer. Despite MAS, I find I can't let it go and spent the money to have it re-fretted last year. Still can't really do a G chop, but in a world of too many guitarists at every jam, I always get compliments, more for the extra layer of sound texture than for my mediocre abilities as a player. Seems there is no end to the new things I find are possible with this instrument.

[catmandu2]

...authenticity doesn't mean much when you are so young and your self is still under construction...

We're all, always "under construction"... it's just that the picture (frame of reference) generally enlarges. Some folks may be "finished projects" (in terms of ego development), as it were, but IME, doors open to other aspects. Ego is just another step toward something else, beyond. It doesn't end.

The comfort and "security" afforded by maturation comes at a cost. We seem to adjust our worldviews so that they better enable us to survive wthout the emotional chaos of adolescence...but just as with anything, sublimating idealism for "reality" is a tradeoff.

It may not seem that important from hindsight of maturity, but whatever happens during youth is as "authentic"--may be subject to greater vicissitudes, and such, but this is also an attribute of youth--the urge and impetus for exploration and creativity.

[JeffD]

We're all, always "under construction"... it's just that the picture (frame of reference) generally enlarges. Some folks may be "finished projects" (in terms of ego development), as it were, but IME, doors open to other aspects. Ego is just another step toward something else, beyond. It doesn't end. .

Well this is the stuff of a separate thread, and perhaps not on this forum. I know what you mean but there is a way that I entirely disagree. I have found that more doors open when I admit to myself what my preferences are, what I like, what my drink is, what my musical tastes are, what I have become as a personality, as a person, and try to identify to some extent how I got here, etc. Not that it is nolonger plastic, but I have to "come from somewhere specific" in order to go anywhere interesting. Or, similarly, life is much more interesting when I have a point of view.

It may not seem that important from hindsight of maturity, but whatever happens during youth is as "authentic"--may be subject to greater vicissitudes, and such, but this is also an attribute of youth--the urge and impetus for exploration and creativity.

The main attribute of youth is that maturity has not as yet emerged.

[catmandu2]

Well this is the stuff of a separate thread

...life is much more interesting when I have a point of view.

Yes, my apologies.

IME, the more points of view I can conceive = greater interest (larger world)...narrowing POV often has the reverse effect.

Trying to resist further thread corruption...Confucious says: after you develop all that nice ego, let it go..

But as far as "authenticity"--the raging hormones, insecurities, and uncertainties of youth are all authentic, aren't they? ("knowledge" often means "cessation of exploration")

[JeffD]

So you are telling me "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[farmerjones]

i dunno, but sublimating is the wrong word there. Jus' sayin.

[catmandu2]

i dunno, but sublimating is the wrong word there. Jus' sayin.

Well of course you don't have to agree, but I find it quite apt:

Def: (Psychology) . to divert the energy of (a sexual or other biological impulse) from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sublimate

[farmerjones]

To sublimate is to go from a solid to a gas, without going through a liquid state.

Merry Christmas

[catmandu2]

To sublimate is to go from a solid to a gas, without going through a liquid state.

Merry Christmas

Yes (but I'm not a chemist )

[Steve Sorensen]

Played banjo as a kid. It started to irritate me. Quit.

Mandolin is just so much more loveable.

Steve