Notes from the Field

Wow. My explorations of the electric mandolin have led me to some surprising conclusions (well surprising to me anyway). It’s not what I thought.

I got a four string electric, and an amp, and have gotten past messing with the ookie noises I can make with the settings on my modeling amp and figured out how to get from how I sound to how I want to sound. For the most part. I have lots to learn, but I am on my way.

I can play loud angry fiddle tunes. I have figured out a range of tones I like, and when and where to use them, and its good enough for now.

So now what?

I have been pursuing this almost entirely alone, just playing in my living room. Not having other people to play with is killing me, as that is my main thing in the acoustic mandolin world. I jam or rehearse at least twice usually three times a week in that world.

I went to an electric jam at this bar several times, and it was fun, but it was a bunch of paunch rockers, playing all 70s 80s and 90s rock, and little or no flexibility about where the mandolin “fits in” (unless there was a mandolin in the original, like Led Zeppelin’s Battle of Evermore). Not me. Not me at all.

My electric guitar playing brother pointed out, as have others, that my modeling amp puts the whole history of rock and roll at my fingertips. The implication being that if I want to use it correctly, I need to learn the whole history of rock in roll. (What was I thinking – of course one needs to learn the genre.)

But playing rock guitar on the mandolin, and aspiring (at my age) to be the god of the small guitar, is ridiculous in the extreme.

I love the electric mandolin as used in Western Swing – and I have been working a little on that. But that too is a whole universe, and like rock, it will take me a while to get into.

The more fundamental thing is that electric mandolin is not just a mandolin electrofied. It really is a different culture, or at least it is outside the mandolin culture I am used to. I naively did not think it through. I kind of went forward half assuming there would be these electric jams, where I would find people to play electric music with and I could meet weekly with them and all would be wonderful and ummm... electric.

What I am finding is that in the electric world, (guitar mostly, but electric mandolin is not breaking out of this mold) it is mostly performing or recording. You either perform, hope to perform, prepare to perform, rehearse, or you record, or prepare to record, or you compose and record, making wonderful music files to post here and there. Or both.

So I need to form a band - become a composer - or play alone at home, making the wallpaper peel in the living room.

What does an adult, non-professional, electric guitar player do?

The other option seems to me to be the hobby consisting of purchasing new equipment, and fiddling with it as you pursue an ever rarified tone of wonderfulness, and thereby avoid all the much harder problems of what the heck to play, and with whom.

So I desperately need a context in which electric mandolin makes sense, and especially where I can find others in an electric context and play with them regularly and have fun. Failing that I am afraid my interest in this will fade away once the novelty and intellectual pursuit have played out.